The Aesthetics of Protest: Street Politics and Urban Physiology in Bangkok

The Aesthetics of Protest: Street Politics and UrbanPhysiology in Bangkok

Noah ViernesAkita International University, Japan

Abstract The urban street is a significant canvas within the material cartography of thenation-state’s spatial frontier. Between March and May of 2010, the United Front forDemocracy against Dictatorship, also known as the “Red Shirts,” painted Bangkok red asone of the most cohesive assemblage of street protests in Thai political history. Eachprotestor donated ten cubic centimeters of blood to be poured at several sites, including theGovernment House of Thailand, the ruling Democrat Party headquarters, and the PrimeMinister’s residence. Other vials were used to paint murals along the walls of the Old City.The intensified aesthetic presence of Thailand’s rural voting majority challenged a historicmarginality in the Thai polity, and was one of many semiotic tactics that foreshadowed theviolence of the eventual military intervention under the name “Operation Reclaim Space.”The city itself was projected as a wounded body, while the Red Shirts—as ThongchaiWinichakul [“The ‘Germs’: The Reds’ Infection of the Thai Political Body,” NewMandala, May 3, 2010, available online at ,http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/05/03/thongchai-winichakul-on-the-red-germs/#more-9382. ] so observed at thetime—were heavily objectified as germs invading the sanitary walls of the city. Thisapproach to protest in Bangkok treats the development of the contemporary polis as anurban physiology, simultaneously driven by an intensification of presence and the “goodhealth” prerogatives of acceptable citizenship in the global city.

Blood is everywhere—in the galleries, on the stage, in the news, on the ground.1

Introduction

As the modalities of politics shift in the wake of military coups, the aesthetic andaffective dimensions of power flow into new spaces. The passionate surge ofprotests in Bangkok in early 2010, a delayed response triggered by the 2006military coup, illuminated the contentious zone of disagreement in Thai politicswhile captivating the spectral attention of the city. The leadership of apredominantly rural assemblage known as the “Red Shirts” called upon itsmembers to donate ten cubic centimeters of blood, as if invoking the participatorywill to be creative and artistic in non-conventional settings—what Nicolas

This article follows the Thai convention of referencing Thai names using first names andWestern names using surnames when used more than once.

1 James M. Bradburne (ed.), Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology (Munich, Londonand New York: Prestel, 2002), p. 18.

New Political Science, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.995395

q 2015 Caucus for a New Political Science

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

Bourriaud calls relational aesthetics.2 After spilling the donated blood at severalsites around the city, one of the leaders yelled from the stage one evening, “Wehave our own art.” At the time, Siam Mapped author and current President of theAssociation for Asian Studies, ThongchaiWinichakul, wrote that the protests werelinked to the visual, spatial, and discursive dynamics of the city.3 The Red Shirtscritiqued the everyday formations of state policy as an urban aesthetics andintervened in the securitization and circulation of space that I call urbanphysiology. The concept of urban physiology entails a mobility of citizenshipthrough enhanced visibility, on one hand, and the threat of invasion to the urbanbody on the other. This ordering of the city highlights the state’s normalization ofviolence through contemporary images of an infected polis. The Red Shirtprotestors appeared to Bangkokians as stigmatized germs who would even go sofar as to invade a hospital, which I restage in the concluding episode of this article.But their tactics also invoke Michel Foucault’s claim in The Birth of The Clinic thatthe history of the state is ordered by political links between bodies, health, andvisuality.4 As a meditation on the contemporaneous rise of urban-based streetprotests globally, the following articulation of its aesthetic dimensions raisesquestions about the production of inclusion and exclusion, the medical and thepolitical, and the visual and the spatial: specifically, what can the aesthetics ofprotest in Bangkok tell us about the disrupted body of the contemporary globalpolis?

The aesthetic approach assembled here treats the particularities of Thai politicsas a struggle over the image. The political theorist Jacques Ranciere argues that thepolitical is aesthetic such that power can be perceived when the count of whobelongs in the polity is redistributed as a disagreement that heightens the visibilityof previously marginal parts. Images are “operations, relations between thesayable and the visible, ways of playing with the before and the after, cause andeffect.”5 This Rancierean reading comports well with Thai politics asdemonstrated in the 2010 Thai language publication of The Political Thinking ofJacques Ranciere, by the Thammasart University political theorist ChairatCharoensin-olarn.6 In the preface, Chairat stated that the emergence of color-coded street protestors demanded a consideration of Ranciere’s politics ofaesthetics because “rural voters, or the grass roots, resemble ‘a miscount’ in Thaisociety.”7 He was referring to Ranciere’s assertion that “[p]olitics arises from acommunity of ‘parts,’ which is always a false count, a double count, or amiscount.”8 The Thai political scientist Pandit Chanrochanakit moves moredirectly into this aesthetic dimension by linking artistic practice with Thai street

2Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du reel, 2002).3 Thongchai Winichakul, “The ‘Germs’: The Reds’ Infection of the Thai Political Body,”

New Mandala, May 3, 2010, available online at ,http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/05/03/thongchai-winichakul-on-the-red-germs/#more-9382. .

4Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York:Vintage Books, 1994).

5 Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (New York: Verso, 2007), p. 6.6 Chairat Charoensin-olarn, The Political Thinking of Jacques Ranciere

[khwaamkhitthangkaanmeungkhongJaaksRorngseeyae] (Bangkok: Khled Thai, 2010),pp. 7–8.

7 Ibid.8 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),

p. 6.

2 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

politics, which he sees as a necessary starting point for the presupposition ofequality in democratic practice.9 He writes that in the wake of a conservative waveof urban-based art exhibitions in 2006, that effectively militarized the image of theThai state, renowned artists like Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and ApichatpongWeersethakul turned toward the rural provinces to “deform,” dignify, anddemocratize the polity from the outside in. The Red Shirts painted the streets ofBangkok red in 2010 as a manifestation of equality and possibility, and as ademand for a recount of who belongs.

The following street-based episodes of blood spilled in Bangkok form both asignificant memory in the recent history of Thai politics and a persistent set ofcircumstances that illuminate the everyday violence that rages on. On theafternoon of April 14, 2014, the Red Shirt-aligned poet Kamol Duangpasuk, morecommonly known by his penname Mai Neung K. Kunthee, was gunned down innorthern Bangkok. Mai Neungwas a crucial member of the Red Shirt art wing andpainted poems on the city walls with the donated blood of Red Shirt streetprotestors in 2010. His murder signaled the ongoing violent imaginary of thepolitical in Thailand where artistic practice emerges as a core target. Whileacademics and media personalities debate whether or not the 2006 or 2014military coups in Thailand provided a procedure for resolving its divisions, thesesmaller scale events motivate a literal return to the spilling of blood and its impacton cotemporary images of the political.10

Think New, Act New

“We have our own art,” is what I heard from an amplified network ofloudspeakers as I walked through the middle of Ratchadamnoen Avenue in theusually gridlocked section of Bangkok’s Old City on March 21, 2010. Pasted ontothe old walls that comprise the original fortifications of Bangkok built almost twoand a half centuries ago, paintings constructed from the blood donations ofprotestors testified to a unified presence of unprecedented visual dissent. Duringthe previous nine days, the red-shirted United Front for Democracy againstDictatorship (UDD) were calling for new elections and the end of the elitist Thaibureaucratic polity (amart) by filling these streets to full capacity. For possible riotcontrol, the military set up portable operations centers in side streets, with mapsand logistical intelligence that too easily recalled scenes from famous war films.The grand opening of the Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall and its panoramic Trueinternet cafe, which attempted to visually blend the continued modernization ofthe area with its status as national heritage, was now boarded up and partitionedoff from the protest site. Ten lanes of the Old City’s primary vein transitioned intoa national cartography of tents, sonorous stages, and resolute pedestrians. As acritical incursion into dominant representations of political visibility, the visualcoagulation of red t-shirts, red blood, their “red march” through Bangkok, and

9 Pandit Chanrochanakit, “Deforming Thai Politics: As Read through ThaiContemporary Art,” Third Text 25:4 (2011), pp. 419–429.

10A critical mass of leading scholars at the 2014 Thai Studies Conference in Sydney,Australia doubted the possibility of the military coup that unfolded weeks later. Instead,they imagined a rebalancing in the relationship between the military and the monarchy, themilitary’s failed attempt to eliminate the divisions of the 2006 Coup, and General Prayuth’sattempt to mediate the two conflicting parties during the 2014 Shutdown Bangkok protests.

Aesthetics of Protest 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

other red signs, challenged the military victory of the 2006 coup and theappointment of an unelected government under Abhisit Vejjajiva, as Thailand’sappointed Prime Minister from 2008 to 2011. The UDD’s declaration of anautonomous aesthetics led me toward a reflection on the chromatic intersectionsof politics as they unfold along concrete intersections across the city. How exactlyhad “colors” and blood become the choice tactic for the politics of recognition inthe city?

At the time, many protestors wore red shirts in support of the ousted PrimeMinister Thaksin Shinawatra who, since his election in 2001, appealed to a ruralmajority on the basis of easily accessible microcredit loans and a comprehensiveuniversal health care program. In this sense, red conveyed collective attempts to“red light” rural neglect and elite privilege in Bangkok. But these reformsthreatened middle class and bureaucratic interests in Bangkok under theassumption that populist domestic policies were being used to shore up electoralmajorities in the provinces. Thus, many observers opine, “at the heart of theproblem lies the urban-rural divide.”11 The Red Shirts were, in fact, building upona color-coded protest model that had emerged in previous years. In early 2006, agrowing number of middle class Bangkokians were moved to protest when theShin Corporation, in which the Prime Minister’s family held a 49.6 percent stake,was sold tax-free to Singaporean Temasek Holdings.12 The deal sparked theformation of the yellow-shirt-wearing People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) andwas framed not only as selling a significant national asset for personal gain, aconflict of interest, but as the spark for petitions to “topple” the Thaksin regime.They would organize their anti-Thaksin crusade, their colors suggested, bystrengthening their association with conservative national institutions. Theiryellow shirts symbolized the institution of the Thai monarchy (as yellowrepresents Monday, the day of the reigning King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s birth).Following a popular narrative of contemporaneous Thai studies scholarship, theypointed to Thaksin’s unprecedented corruption as the wedge of nationaldivision.13 Outside Bangkok, escalating Buddhist-Muslim violence in southernThailand, and the government-led “War on Drugs” that claimed over 2000 lives inless than three months, conveyed the darker side of Thaksinian policies in theprovinces.14 While Thaksin could be perceived as a revolutionary to a historicallymarginalized rural majority in Thailand’s neglected north and northeasternregions, the ousted Prime Minister simultaneously drew out new enemies. Thetransmission of these antagonisms through colors served to superimposeinstitutional aims over the images of “the people,” the ideological fault lines ofan escalated political crisis.

Thaksin’s legacy is newness itself, a metaphor that dates back to his 2001campaign slogan “Think new, act new.” Within national traditions that dominatethe selective domain of everyday life, for example in the royal montage that playsbefore all feature films in Thailand, or the national anthem that commands

11Kitti Prasirtsuk, “Thailand in 2008: Crises Continued,” Asian Survey 49:1 (2009), p. 174.12 Kasian Tejapira, “Toppling Thaksin,” New Left Review 39 (May/June 2006), p. 7.13 Ibid., 5–37.14Meryam Dahbhoiwala, “A Chronology of Thailand’s War on Drugs,” Article 2:3

(2003), pp. 10–16, available online at ,http://www.humanrights.asia/resources/journals-magazines/article2/0203. .

4 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

attention twice daily in all public venues, Thaksin sought to enhance his ownvisibility. To “think new” was to move beyond the collective ranks of Thailand’smoral hierarchy as an individual. The 2006 Yellow Shirt protests gained currencyamong unlikely supporters precisely because they defied the individuating forcesof globalization just as they, paradoxically, fantasized of a critical mass of middleclass street protestors, such as the “Black May” protests of 1992 that claimed toend five decades of military dictatorship in Thailand. Swept into power underprojections of building new middle classes beyond Bangkok, Thaksin celebratedhis 2001 election victory at a Starbucks and took a picture with his daughter on herfirst and only day of work at MacDonald’s. Such events were aimed to reaffirm theneoliberal culture of individual consumption that contradicted an anti-Capitalistrhetoric of “sufficiency economics” (buy-only-what-you-need) logic that informedthe Royal response to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.15 Thaksin’s easily accessiblemicrocredit programs drove a new class of rural entrepreneurs to embrace riskbeyond the village in a popular culture of vulnerability, lay-offs, and corruption.This “Thaksinization” of the nation, Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit observe,lay in his ability to “institutionalize money politics” on a “more regularizedstage.”16 Attempting to explain the reasoning behind the 2006 Coup, ThongchaiWinichakul wrote that Thaksin threatened the “clean politics” mythology heldtogether by the revered pillars of nation, religion, and monarchy. But instead ofappealing to “the legal process or accountability mechanisms within the politicalsystem,” the anti-Thaksin Yellow Shirts aimed their case to a “higher moralauthority.”17 Rather than topple Thaksin for corrupting national moralconventions, Thongchai concluded, the Yellow Shirts were out to toppledemocracy itself.

National institutions often operate under the pretext of fulfilling the goals ofparticipation in the body-politic, which rely on the perception of an imaginedcommunity. Benedict Anderson suggests that deeply embedded in this perceptionof the nation is the false idea that it functions as “a deep, horizontalcomradeship.”18 The Yellow Shirts’ responses to Thaksin were overtly nationalist,and their solutions were top-down rather than horizontal. In February of 2006, theYellow Shirts began to occupy familiar political spaces of Bangkok in their call formilitary and royal intervention.19 Both the military and the monarchy symbolize

15 Prior versions of royal frugality, according to Paul Handley, run closer to an economyof rewards where “selfless motivation,” “the hardest workers,” and “honesty” link moralbenevolence with a neoliberal modernity. Paul Handley, The King Never Smiles: A Biographyof Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 182.

16 Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, “Thailand’s Thaksin: New Populism or OldCronyism?” Unpublished conference proceedings, Johns Hopkins University-SAIS,Washington, DC, November 27, 2001, available online at ,http://pioneer.netserv.chula.ac.th/ , ppasuk/papers.htm. .

17 Thongchai Winichakul, “Toppling Democracy,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 38:1(2008), pp. 11–37.

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), p. 7.

19 This kind of military intervention is familiar to a history of political transition inThailand, which begins with the 1932 toppling of absolute monarchy, and continues withthe re-assertion of Kingship under the military dictatorship of Sarit Thanarat following the1957 coup, as well as royal intervention in the October 14, 1973 and “Black May” 1992democracy protests.

Aesthetics of Protest 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

order in Thai politics as institutions perceived as calibrating competing nationalforces. But the military can never garner legitimacy on its own. Since the 1932transition from Absolute Monarchy to Constitutional Democracy, political changein Thailand arose from compromise between opposing forces. In 1932, the socialdemocrat Pridi Panomyong joined forces with the military-minded PlaekKhittasangkha (later known as Luang Pibulsonggram) to carry out the nation’sfirst coup d’etat. Each of the eleven later coup transformations, including the mostrecent in May of 2014, carefully negotiated the power of the monarchy to maskself-interested aims of intervention with images of higher moral purpose.

To the Yellow Shirts, only the intervention of a military-monarchical alliancecould check Thaksin’s executive affront to the “guardian” institutions, whichincluded independent regulatory agencies established under the relativelyuntested provisions of the 1997 People’s Constitution. These guardian institutionsincluded the National Counter Corruption Commission, the Human RightsCommission, and the Election Commission.20 Penned in the wake of a militarycrackdown in May 1992 and passed under the anti-corruption momentum of theAsian Financial Crisis, the 1997 Constitution weighed in favor of the nationalpopular vote, which ultimately tilted toward the populated north andnortheastern provinces. But during the Thaksin years (2001–2006), theconstitutional shift also ensured that provincial populism trumped elitebureaucratic interests in Bangkok, no confidence votes were more difficult towage, and an unexpected single-party majority dominated the appointments toindependent agencies. Through “a combination of appointments, intimidation,and bribery, particularly focusing on the Senate,” the argument runs, Thaksin wasable to exercise executive power in the managerial style of an unchecked CEO.21

On September 19, 2006 the Thai military reclaimed the space of nationalpolitics by seizing the visual culture of the city. In a procession of tanks, theysimultaneously occupied television stations and intersections across Bangkok,and delivered live nationwide broadcasts that called an end to the Thaksinregime under the terms of their interim junta, the Council for Democratic Reformunder the King as the Head of the State. The military-appointed ConstitutionalTribunal hoped for a return to a pre-Thaksin past by banning Thaksin’s Thai RakThai (lit. “Thais love Thais”) party for five years and swiftly passed a newconstitution as the prerequisite for holding the December 2007 elections.Unexpectedly, the forces of Thaksin regrouped under a new name, the People’sPower Party (PPP), and won a plurality that posed the threat of rendering thecoup null and void. However, the victory faced a series of significant obstacles.First, the PAD seized and occupied the Government House and the nation’slargest airport for eight days. At the same time, the half-appointed senate

20 The National Counter Corruption Commission handed down a decision, which wasoverturned by the Constitutional Court, that would have disqualified Thaksin’s 2001election due to inconsistencies in his declared assets. Of course, the decision raisesquestions over whether Thaksin needed to raise his executive power to negotiate existingchecks. Furthermore, escalating violence in the Muslim south and Thaksin’s heavy-handedtactics during his War on Drugs campaign demonstrated the Human Rights Commission’sinability to hold Thaksin accountable.

21 Tom Ginsburg, “Constitutional Afterlife: The Continuing Impact of Thailand’s Post-Political Constitution,” Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series, Public Law andLegal Theory Working Paper No. 252 (November 2008), p. 21.

6 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

(a revision of the newly passed 2007 Constitution) lodged formal complaintsagainst the PPP, which ranged from electoral irregularities to unauthorizedtelevision show appearances.22

As a concession to Yellow Shirt street protests and other images of highermoral purpose, the Constitutional Court disbanded the PPP under directrecommendations from the Election Commission.23 The very guardianinstitutions that had bolstered the Thaksin regime now became the extendedmachinery of the 2006 coup. In the vacuum, the coalition of Thaksin-alignedparties fell apart, paving the way for a National Assembly vote that tapped anti-Thaksin Democrat, Abhisit Vejjajiva, as Prime Minister without an electoralmandate.24 Satisfied, the Yellow Shirts went home. Angered, excluded, anddetermined, the Red Shirts of the UDD launched their two-year nationwidecampaign.

The Semiotics of Exclusion

The UDD formed out of an umbrella of groups united in their quest to oppose the2006 coup, and their fury over the appointment of Abhisit Vejjajiva drovenationwide grass-roots campaigns at the village level. Duncan McCargo conciselymaps this coalition to 400 “political-education schools” in thirty-five provincesand a large network of preexisting regional networks, such as radio stations, vote-canvassers, and grass-roots organizations. The Red Shirts, he observes, gravitatedbetween the pro-Thaksin position that had won crucial policy changes in theirhome regions to “more fundamental issues of democracy and equalopportunity.”25 The UDD first clogged the streets of Bangkok en masse in Aprilof 2009 with the aim of overturning the appointed Abhisit government. After aviolent stand-off in the middle of Bangkok’s largest traffic vein, the VictoryMonument, which led to 123 injuries and at least four deaths, the militarysuccessfully forced an end to the protest.26 A Human Rights Watch accountdescribes the reds as the aggressors, and the UDD’s attempted hi-jacking ofAbhisit Vejjajiva’s motorcade is partly to blame. But there is more to the story ofexclusion.

Coup leaders like Sonthi Boonyaratglin framed the Red Shirts as a threat thatcould be easily connected to a modern perception of rural outsiders:a continuation of the unsettled “red zone” of the radical Left.27 But against this

22Kitti Prasirtsuk, “Thailand in 2009: Colored by Turbulence,” Asian Survey 50:1 (2010),pp. 203–210.

23 The re-composition of the Election Commission after the Coup, Thongchai tells us,began by removing and jailing commissioners alleged to support Thaksin. Thongchai,“Toppling Democracy,” p. 12.

24 Even with the five-year disqualification of both the previous TRT and its PPPreincarnation, Abhisit’s Democrats were only able to draw a coalition through the defectionof Newin Chid chop and twenty-two MPs from the PPP.

25Duncan McCargo, “Thailand’s Twin Fires,” Survival 52:4 (2010), p. 9; see also ClaudioSopranzetti, Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Press,2012), p. 24.

26Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010, p. 355, available online at ,http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/wr2010.pdf. .

27 Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, Thaksin (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2009),p. 300.

Aesthetics of Protest 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

Cold War simplification, films like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His PastLives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2009) and Mekong Hotel (ApichatpongWeerasethakul 2012) dignify the “primitives” of the rural northern andnortheastern regions of Thailand by foregrounding its targeted pacificationwithin an unsettled borderland. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bangkok-centerednational policies deployed military forces to train villages to arm themselvesagainst the threat of communism.28 At the same time, monarchical expeditionsintermittently occupied the area under the twin imperatives of civilization andmodernization, but also as a strategic initiative to build the image of the King “asthe country’s paramount executive and commander in chief.”29 McCargo aptlyasserts that these internal conflicts derive from a core-periphery relationship inwhich “royal Bangkok,” a network of interests based in the modernization of anurban-based bureaucracy, continues its campaign against “the untamed hinter-lands,” and that they are rooted in “the substitution of internal colonialism forEuropean empire.”30 As Bangkok again became the setting for street protests in2010, the Red Shirts appeared in the media-amplified semiotics of fear, an enmitywithin the city that came to mean rural, communist, invasive, infected, violent, aneconomic contagion, and flammable. At worst, they represented the uncivilizedmercenaries of Thaksin, the lone politician who successfully brought develop-ment to the periphery at the expense of Bangkok’s historic privilege.31

The Red Shirt movement thereby moved to highlight their renewed stigma inthe semiotics of the Thai state by projecting a hemorrhaging urban polis. Forbottom-up movements, which the Red Shirts aspire to be, blood became a meansto highlight the violence of exclusion within the circulatory veins of the political.Blood moves beyond the reductive binaries of journalistic categorization in itssignification of “life and death, health and disease, power and powerlessness.”32 Italso connotes bloodline (as in aristocratic or royal lineage), a purity of the nationlinked to a higher moral authority. But shifting from vertical hierarchies tohorizontal flow, the Red Shirts attempted to link their blood to the developmentnodes of global urbanism. Blood was a story about development, a tale about how

28 For example, Jenjira Pongpas remembers her childhood in ApichatpongWeerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel (2012), an experimental documentary film which blendsmagical realism with the politics of recollection in a series of interviews that take placealong the northeastern border of Thailand and Laos: “The army had us internalize thefeeling of loving the nation, loving the community. It was pretty unbelievable. We weretrained as real soldiers. They gave us guns, showed us how to load them . . . ”

29 Summarizing the government-provincial relationship, Handley offers thisobservation: “Distant provinces were administered like remote colonies, with thegovernment’s main interest being to extract something of value—food, timber, andtaxes—and to quash rebellions.” The monarchy was able to enter this contentiousantagonism as a new charitable patron. Handley, King Never Smiles, p. 182.

30McCargo, “Thailand’s Twin Fires,” p. 5.31 In a 2009 interview with The Times (UK), Thaksin is quoted as saying “If there is the

sound of gunfire, of soldiers shooting the people, I’ll return immediately to lead you tomarch on Bangkok.” Richard Lloyd Parry, “Thaksin Shinawatra: The Full Transcript of HisInterview with The Times,” The Times, November 11, 2009, available online at ,http://www.scribd.com/doc/22409941/Thaksin-Shinawatra-the-full-transcript-of-his-interview-with-The-Times. .

32 James M. Bradburne, “Perspectives on Art, Power, Politics, and Pathology,” J.M.Bradburne (ed.), Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology (Munich, London and New York:Prestel, 2002), p. 11.

8 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

cities organize and incorporate the bodies of nation-states. Christian Holtorfargues a related point that the medical emphasis on blood circulation duringEurope’s early modern period led to later models of urbanization, such that traffic,wealth, and news proved that “everything circulates.”33 In “Semiology and theUrban,” Roland Barthes described how a variety of images andmeanings circulatewithin the city like linguistic parts of a story to be read.34 As a semiotic text ofsigns that lead us from one episode to the next, blood became central tounderstanding the undertones of Red Shirt exclusion from Bangkok.

A common inclination for representing the marginalized is to reproduce thenarrative of victimhood imposed through the strategies of a select eliteleadership. Chaiwat observes that the 2006 Yellow Shirt protests emerged underthe perception that rural voters were unknowing “victims of Thai Rak Thaipopulism.”35 Jim Taylor’s ethnography of the Red Shirt movement seeks tooverturn this perception by centering the question of agency in the quest for newmodels of protest born in the “awakening,” or ta sawang, of rural protestorsthemselves.36 In his interviews, Taylor underscores the “creative street play” ofthe Red Shirts designed to extend the duration of the 2010 protests in memory ofthose killed. His Deleuzian reading of Red Shirt “lines of flight” locates new pointsof collective persistence whereby the protest continues beyond its journalistictimeline. Even after the 2010 protests, the late Mai Neung Kor Kuntee publishedRed Shirt poetry with a cutting edge literary press while others participated indocumentary and short films.37 The poetic and visual turn of Red Shirt resistancespoke to a growing awareness of the relationship between the redeployment ofsigns and the dignity of protest. More than a movement embodied by keyindividuals, the Red Shirts became visible as Thai politics, as disagreement, and asa conversation about the redistribution of contemporary power. Their locus ofparticipation shifted from victimhood to active engagement whereby equalityitself became the basis for the measurement of democracy.

In new ways, the Red Shirts raised awareness of their exclusion from Bangkokto highlight how so-called “political actors” enter the arena of images. Theyarticulated a physiology of the state, an aesthetic regime which heightens thelikelihood of violence while exposing the violence of state-making. Politics is not asolution. It is, Ranciere argues, a disagreement that carries “the presupposition ofthe equality of anyone and everyone.”38 Thaksin’s “pro-poor reforms” were by nomeans equalizing, nor did his deals reflect much more than a branded neoliberalpopulism called “Thaksinomics.” But the Red Shirts seemed to use his brand, as

33Christian Holtorf, “My Blood for Thee,” J.M. Bradburne (ed.), Blood: Art, Power, Politicsand Pathology (Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 2002), p. 27.

34 “[T]he reflections that I am going to present to you are the reflections of an amateur inthe etymological sense of this word: amateur of signs, he who loves signs; amateur of cities,he who loves the city. For I love both the city and signs.” Roland Barthes, “Semiology andthe Urban,” M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos (eds), The City and the Sign: AnIntroduction to Urban Semiotics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 89.

35 Chaiwat, Political Thinking of Jacques Ranciere, p. 7.36 Jim Taylor, “Remembrance and Tragedy: Understanding Thailand’s ‘Red Shirt’ Social

Movement,” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 27:1 (2012), p. 124.37Mai Neung Kor Kunthee, The People’s Institution (Sathapanasathabanprachachon)

(Bangkok: Ho Narika Press, 2011);My Father (Pimpaka Towira Extra Virgin 2010); Boundary(Nontawat Numbenchapol Mobile Lab 2013).

38 Ranciere, Disagreement, p. 17.

Aesthetics of Protest 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

Taylor observes, “to communicate their frustration and loss” over the end ofelectoral democracy.39 Caricatured as a rural herd of Thaksin’s buffaloesthreatening traffic in Bangkok, they were no longer welcome in the city, just asThaksin was no longer welcome in Thailand. The politics of “red” aesthetics lay inthe possibility that entry to the city works as a basis for inclusion to the Thainational body. But their disagreement with the body’s hierarchy ensured that Redwould be perceived as foreign and invasive.

In 2010, red became an everyday urban stream for visualizing landscapes ofviolence, even though color often occupies a figurative role in the representationof nationhood. In the triangulated color scheme of the Thai flag, the symbolism ofred as spilt blood diffuses into a translation of nationhood because it must be readalongside white for Buddhism and blue for the Monarchy. Red means blood andthus enters the final stanza of the Thai national anthem, which reads “Wewill giveevery drop of blood for the progress and victory of the Thai nation.”40 In thisdominant sense, blood begs to be perceived as sacrifice within the continualproject of nation-building. But Taylor’s interview with one of the Red Shirtprotestors gives us a more productive illustration of what red can mean. “Thechoice of the colour red . . . is because of its universal colour of resistance.”41 Theprotestor continues that it means “heat, energy, blood, and sacrifice,” a dominant“primary color,” and a “red light” signaling for the Red Shirts to stop the legacy ofthe military junta under the 2007 Constitution.42

This semiotic field of aesthetics is part of a critical juncture in acontemporaneous wave of global street politics. At the Occupy Wall Streetprotests, ethnographer Michael Taussig explains that the interplay of signs andmeanings conveyed by the protestors ended up repeating dominant mediums,such as the anchor-centered newscast, which obstructed their ability to find a newlanguage of resistance.43 Amid placards and “mic checks,” the revolutionarychallenge, he insinuates, is to say something new. In a similar everydaydocumentation of the Bangkok protests in 2010, Claudio Sopranzetti finds adisconcerting reappropriation of state ideology within the Red Shirts as theirleadership spout a war discourse that seems out of step with a true people’srevolution. To be fair, the threat of militancy born of dissatisfaction and inferiorityis ever-present in all movements, but particularly troubling in cases such as theUDD disruption of a gay pride parade on February 21, 2009, which led to itscancelation. These deviations from a well-rounded imagination of equality mayserve as a reminder that social movements often gain strength in exploiting forcesthat compete contemporaneously within a closed hegemonic field. The stateapplauds these kinds of antagonisms as proof of the need to act as arbitrator.

By wearing red and donating blood, the Red Shirts appropriated their own“heat, energy, blood” to negate the thermoregulation of the state body. Their bloodritual challenged a perceived exclusion within the chromatic regime ofcontemporary governmentality in Bangkok by seeking to defamiliarize thedominant image of the urban center. On Monday March 14, 2010, as the front

39 Taylor, “Remembrance and Tragedy,” p. 126.40สละเลอดทกหยาดเปนชาตพลเถลงประเทศชาตไทยทวมชยชโย41 Taylor, “Remembrance and Tragedy,” p. 137.42 Ibid.43Michael Taussig, “I’m so Angry I Made a Sign,” Critical Inquiry 39:1 (2012), pp. 56–88.

10 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

pages of Thai dailies illustrated the sheer numbers that now occupiedRatchadamnoen Avenue, the UDD Red Shirts announced their desire to splashthe city in blood. Their tactic of drawing and distributing blood at key pointsaround the city would provide a calculated shock for generating internationalpublicity on the divisions of Thai politics. But the tactic would also expose howcontemporary forms of power operate within the frame of a state physiology. AlanKlima illustrates that between 1973 and 1992, protests in Thailand gainedcurrency in the trail of dead bodies that these events produced because thetragedies could be used as bargaining chips for the subsequent policies of theincoming regime.44 The UDD inverted the relationship by conducting their owncollective bloodletting, which exposed the violence of a militarized state alongsidea collective will to use art in the service of politics.

Preparations

The image of health in Thailand is historically situated at the intersection ofcitizenship and the city. The hospital, the clinic, or any other medical institutionthat distributes a hierarchy of knowledge about the urban body (for example, aDepartment of Sanitation or Ministry of Public Health) enters images of widenedstreets and the evacuation of unsightly pedestrians as modern validations ofprogress. Globally, these kinds of developments ranged from Haussmann’sredesign of a “protest-free” Paris to the contemporaneous world travels and urbanmodernization reforms of nineteenth century of King Chulalongkorn, wherebythe unsightly foreigners of the street were perceived as contributing toprostitution, gambling, and disease.45 Urban solutions designed to cleanse thecity were no less relevant when the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority walled offthe Khlong Toey slums that surrounded the IMF Meeting in 1991, or when theyremoved stray dogs, migrant workers, homeless people, and other contradictionsto the continuation of neoliberalism after the Asian Financial Crisis, from thestreets of Bangkok during the 11th APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in 2003. The2003 meeting was fittingly subtitled “AWorld of Differences.”46 The triangulationof public health, the appearance of the city, and national administration stabilizedcitizenship within a visual regime that functioned on the recognition of who wasin charge and who belonged.

The blood ritual of the UDD recalled these urban temporalities of exclusionwaged in the nameof governmental progress.OnMondaymorning,March 13, 2010,the UDD began the second day of their march on Bangkok. Over the previousweekend, caravans of truck beds filledwith red-clad protestors flooded into the city

44Alan Klima, The Funeral Casino Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead inThailand (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

45 Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongphaichit, A History of Thailand (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), p. 101; Lucien Fournereau, Bangkok in 1892 (Bangkok: White LotusPress, 1998), p. 43.

46 The Thaksin administration initiated the repatriation of 621 “illegal” migrants back toCambodia and ordered the police to clear 10,000 “homeless children, adults, beggars andprostitutes” a month ahead of the October 20–21 APEC meeting. “Thailand to Clean upBangkok Streets Before APEC Summit,” Voice of America (September 29, 2003), availableonline at ,http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-a-2003-09-29-23-thailand/394035.html. .

Aesthetics of Protest 11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

to form one of the largest political protests in Thai history. They entered Bangkokthrough the suburbs, past the shoppingmalls, from east to west along the NewCityvein of Sukhumvit Road en route to the main protest site at the Phan Fa Bridge onRachadamnoenAvenue.Thisheritage coreofBangkok is the symbolic centerof royalpower,where, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, so-called “civilization”wasfirst built into the national landscape. Most of the caravans were met with applauseby thousands of workers throughout the city who likely hailed from similarprovincesoutside ofBangkok.Others, according to theUDDleadership,werepeltedby rocks as they entered the Old City on river boats along the Saen Saeb canal.

Perceptions of a Red Shirt invasion were informed by the primetime televisionbroadcasts of the previous week, whereby military officials like Colonel SansernKaewkamnerd encouraged Bangkok residents to prepare for blocked roads, heavytraffic, and a city that would not circulate as usual. Newspapers, government ads,and conservative radio talk shows warned of protest stench and an insurgent-like“forest surrounding the town” confrontation. The cabinet of Prime MinisterAbhisit Vejjajiva quickly invoked the Internal Security Act, which gave themilitarythe lead role in regulating the city and surrounding provinces. The Act issignificant for understanding the shift from the sovereign prerogative of soldieringborderlands to one of surgical urban diagnosis, where strategic sites of the city areplaced under careful observation in the interest of restoring order. External threatsare thus reborn as a pathology of infestation. In a map entitled “Ringing the City,”The Bangkok Post (Bangkok) plotted ten UDD entry points, visualized as red dotsthat should be avoided at all costs (Figure 1).47 Hotels reprinted this map toencourage vigilance among tourists.48 This latter relation between hospitality andsecurity suggests that the circulation of the global city does not simply comprise apre-set cartography of who belongs, but one where the foreign tourist becomesbetter protected than the naturalized yet targeted citizen-subject. The unfortunateimplication of this kind of global connection is that a neoliberal order ofprotections trumps deliberative procedures of the national polity, which meansthat global security trumps national elections. Thaksin promised the provincesnew access to global markets, but, ironically, assured its foreign investors a moredominant, and protected, position in the urban landscape.

These security preparations aimed to contain the urban immune system’sforeign threat and thus revolved around privilege and access. The history ofBangkok protests demonstrates how participants reclaim agency within a historyof dispossession by revisiting the violent cartographies of the city. It is less aprimal moment in collective bonding than an aversion to the conventions of statedeath culture through the politicization of images. Part of the context is historical,as in the pro-democracy protests of 1973, 1976, 1992, and connected to thearchitectural sites where political signs are reinterpreted. For example, theDemocracy Monument, constructed in 1939 according to a conterminous conceptof “the people” and the global historical rise of constitutional democracy, providesa familiar background in the remembered image of these historic events. But it isalso likely that the Red Shirts marched on Bangkok due to the need to be included

47 “Ringing The City,” Bangkok Post, March 13, 2010, available online at ,http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/thaksin-judgement-day/protest_sites.html. .

48 “Government Lowers Security Net,” Bangkok Post, March 9, 2010. Available online at,http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/34108/govt-lowers-security-net. .

12 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

Figure 1. “Ringing the city,” published in the Bangkok Post on March 13, 2010, sought tovisualize an impending threat to the polis. After all, Geoffrey Parker so observes, theoriginal meaning of polis is “stronghold” (Geoffrey Parker, Sovereign City: The City-StateAncient and Modern (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 33)

Aesthetics of Protest 13

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

as part of the expanding global-urban imaginary. Half of the world’s populationlives in cities, and that number will rise to sixty percent by 2030.49With violence asa historical likelihood in the exclusionary regime of the city, the Red Shirts wouldlike to believe that incorporation into the urban polity serves to alleviate thehemorrhaging of the state. But they are all too familiar with modernity’s lines ofcontinuity that these streets represent. Video vendors throughout the protest sitessell footage of prior crackdowns to reinforce the violent historical cartography ofthese same streets. Above the tens of thousands of protestors at the Phan Faprotest stage, a floating red blood cell the size of a helicopter hovered in the sky,emblazoned with the word “Ahimsa.”50

Art in the Violent Cartography

Responding to the call of the UDD leadership, 20,000 protestors lined up near themain stage at Phan Fa bridge to donate ten cubic centimeters of blood.51 Thecertified doctors who administered to the Red Shirt donorswould later be smearedbymedical boards forwasting bloodon aprotest tactic insteadof reserving it for thehospitalized sick. The donors entered the white tents enthusiastically and exitedwith the penetrated arm raised—which appeared to exhibit the pride of beinginvolved as much as it was also procedure to halt the bleeding. Between March 16and 17, it was reported that the UDD collected 300,000 cubic centimeters of bloodfrom over 70,000 protestor donations.52 On the afternoon of the 16th, the protestorscaravanned toward the Government House, several blocks northeast of the mainstage, with 300 liters of the newly collected vials that resembled large jugs of redpaint.53 At the gate of the Government House, a brief prayer and chant was voicedby Brahmin Sakrapee Promchart after which the blood was poured at the gates.Even as thepolice andmilitary blocked theprotestors fromentering the compound,the blood oozed freely across the gated security points. Foreign and domesticjournalists took pictures, while officials from the Public Health Ministry soonarrived onsite to remove the blood before it could stain the white gates.

From the Government House, the Red caravan headed east-northeast towardthe Democrat Party headquarters. By moving the blood instillation to theheadquarters of the ruling party that night, the blood of the Red Shirts becamenoise inserted into this silenced body politic that closed other avenues of political

49Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse (eds), The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries,Politics, and Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 3.

50 The globalization theorist Manfred Steger offers an excellent description of the waysMahatma Gandhi’s popularizing of the term ahimsa, which he defines as “not harming” or“nonviolence,” inspired a global critique of violence as it relates to “society’s ability to passultimate judgment in terms of right and wrong.” Manfred Steger, The Rise of the GlobalImaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 143.

51 “There will be Blood,” Patttaya Today, March 16, 2010, available online at ,http://pattayatoday.net/news/thailand-news/there-will-be-blood/. .

52 Pongphon Sarnsamak, “Blood CouldHave SavedMany Lives,” The Nation (Thailand),March 22, 2010, available online at,http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/2010/03/22/politics/Blood-could-have-saves-many-lives-30125223.html. .

53 Cindy Drukier, “Red Shirt Protesters Spill Blood on Thai Government House,” TheNation (Thailand), March 16, 2010, available online at http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/red-shirt-protestors-thai-government-31478.html.

14 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

mobility. The demobilization of electoral politics, described above, included thefive-year ban of the Thai Rak Thai and PPP, the replacement of the 1997 People’sConstitution with the more conservative 2007 Constitution, and the reassertion ofBangkok as the center of the Thai political body. At the same time, mainstreammedia outlets were poised to sensationalize the blood pouring of the UDD as ananimist attempt to expedite their demands. Here, a primitive voice waged againstthe inefficiency of modern institutions was calling for the dissolution ofparliament and new elections by cursing Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva into aweakened state. But the Red Shirts were also expanding their visibility as a mobilecaravan across the city and as a sign of presence that contravened the moralauthority of the military since the 2006 coup. On one hand the media, military andstate security forces planted narratives of infection into their nationalistcartography of Bangkok. The Red Shirts were also accused of creating a sovereigncity protected by an armed “third force,” a force that could be neutralized bymanning surrounding skyscrapers with military snipers.54 The state narrativebased itself around targets and fixed points, but the Red Shirts connected politicalmobility with the semiotic flexibility of urban movement.

The next morning, the Red Shirts again went east to the Prime Minister’sresidence in the heart of the New City, across the street from one of Bangkok’smost exclusive high-end retail districts. While Abhisit remained shelled-up inArmy barracks in city’s northeastern suburbs, the Red Shirts dropped a few moreliters of blood at the gate of his home at Sukhumvitsoi 31. This time the tactic wasnot simply about the symbolism of executive power associated with the PrimeMinister’s residence. The location was also significant because of the density ofglobal capitalism along Sukhumvit Road, from the recreational businesses thatcater to a large community of western expatriates to the main vein of elevatedmass transportation that moves hundreds of thousands through this neoliberalcorridor daily.55 Along the walking bridges, thousands of service workers andemployees waved to the Red Shirts as they entered and exited Sukhumvit Road.This location made it possible for the protestors to see themselves being seen apartfrom the media-driven perception of invaders. The presence of urban support andred flag waving by the residents of Sukhumvit Road projected a new living imageof who exactly belongs to the contemporary urban polis.

OnMarch 21, the UDD sealed this remarkable association between politics andaesthetics on the fortress walls of the Old City. The movement wing of paintersand poets dropped their brushes into the remaining 45,000 cubic centimeters ofthe blood to give 70meters of canvased form to the Red Shirt’s intervention into anoppressive urban physiology.56 Artists such as Akarapl Ngern-Nei, Vichak Srithai,and Hamer Salwala took part in this unprecedented expression of red art. On thatday, Mai Neung Kor Khuntee wrote his poetry in blood, not foreseeing his own

54 “Top Army, Navy Units Readied for Dispersal,” The Nation (Thailand), April 19, 2010,available online at ,http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/2010/04/19/politics/Top-army-navy-units-readied-for-dispersal-30127373.html. .

55As a primary case study in Bangkok’s transformation from modern to postmodernspace, whereby hybrid forms of individualism and alienating high-rise condominium lifecoexist with the “micro-levels” of inequality, Marc Askew focuses on this street as exemplarof the city’s “multi-layered” meanings that defy any “simple portrait of what the city is.”Marc Askew, Bangkok: Place, Practice and Representation (London and New York: RoutledgePress, 2002), p. 106.

Aesthetics of Protest 15

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

martyrdom in 2014. The blood of past, present, and future, a paint that belonged tono one in particular, flowed into associations of body and city, life and image,democracy and numbers, military and death, and so many other dimensions thatslipped beyond the culturally-governed enclosures of national enmity. The art ofurban protest thus confronts the question of who can speak beyond theconventions of the state in non-conventional ways. The Red Shirts’ blood artlikewise recalls the “collaborative collectivism” of situationist Tokyo-based streetcollective Hi Red Center, who donned the white coats of health officials toorchestrate street Cleaning Events to the curious yet supportive observation ofother urban residents. Hi Red Center attempted to critique “hasty modernization”and beautification campaigns in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Gamesby dressing in the medicalized costume design of state representation.57 Withoutknowing it, the Red Shirts inverted this conceptual deployment by staining thelandscape with blood. More recently, the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi splatteredred paint, in the color of dried blood, across the 8000-square foot roof of NewYork’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition titled, “And How ManyRains Must Fall Before The Stains Are Washed Clean.” The New York Timesreporter Ken Johnson observed that even though the red paint illustrates the“effects of violence,” the effect is lost on Americans that seem so far removed fromthe War On Terror communicated by the paint.58 In the global geography of art,then, the Red Shirts had every right to proclaim “we have our own art.” The tragicrelevance of the mobile exhibit is not only that this stretch of RatchadamnoenAvenue was the site of brutal military crackdowns in 1973, 1976, and 1992, but thatit soon became a cartography of violence in less than three weeks from the time ofits original exhibition. The imagination of the Red Shirts throwing blood ongovernment sites function as a shock to thought that operates on numerous levels,especially in Bangkok-based journalist Nick Nostitz’s photograph of Ministry ofHealth officials cleaning blood spilled outside the gate of the Democratheadquarters on March 16, 2010 (Figure 2). The sight of blood in the streetinvokes the spectacle of a crime scene. Unlike traffic signs that signify rules andoperations, red blood in the street signals that an accident has happened. Themodern city is uncertain and fragile, where collision and medical recuperation arecrucial to the power of the state to provide security for its subjects.

John Locke, among other canonical thinkers of modern political thought, ispartly responsible for promoting the perception of an unsettled frontier that linksfreedom with security. Locke builds the natural right of individual self-defenseinto the prerogatives of governance in saying, “The state of war is a state of enmityand destruction . . . it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroythat which threatens me with destruction.”59 While Lockean laws of self-preservation apply to individuals in the state of nature, state security forces read

Footnote 55 continued56 Pongphong Samsamak, “Artists Create a Gory Message,” The Nation (Thailand),

March 22, 2010, available online at,http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/2010/03/22/politics/Artists-create-a-gory-message-30125243.html. .

57 Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (eds), Collectivism After Modernism: The Art ofSocial Imagination After 1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007), p. 54.

58 Ken Johnson, “Savagery, Mulled in Airy Precincts,” New York Times, May 16, 2013,available online at,http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/arts/design/the-roof-garden-commission-imran-qureshi-at-the-met.html. .

16 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

everyday forms of agitation (for instance, the blocking of traffic) as a pretext forsuch a right to use force under the assumption that these instigators haveobstructed the free-flow of the city. The war as foundingmyth of the nation-state isthus a continued micropolitical imperative of everyday governance. During thefirst UDD march on Bangkok in April of 2009, General Songkitti Jaggabataraclaimed, “We will not use weapons unless it is necessary to defend ourselves.”60

The Red Shirts countered the state narrative of self-defense within an intensifiedimagination of death. They pointed to state threats, for example, from Armyspokesman Colonel Sansern Kaewkamnerd who stated that the “troops wereready to move against the protestors.”61 Meanwhile, Thaksin’s account at the timemirrored eye witness allegations that protestor deaths were being concealed bythe military trucks that swiftly relocated fallen bodies to unknown locations.62

Under the prerogative of protection, the state justified their offensive by shiftingthe terms of violence toward the need to defend the city itself. To assist the army,Thai newspapers referred to “vigilantes roaming the streets,” “thugsblowing upbuses and lobbing Molotov cocktails at soldiers,” and “hooligans attackingpeople and property and blocking roads.”63 The moral discourse of framingenemies does not explain why the army fired into a crowd of Red Shirt

Figure 2. Department of Public Health officials clean blood from Democrat Partyheadquarters on March 16, 2010 at around 7:30 p.m. (Photo used with permission of NickNostitz) (see also Nick Nostitz, Red Vs. Yellow, Vol. 2: Thailand’s Political Awakening (ChiangMai: White Lotus Press, 2011))

Footnote 58 continued59 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (NewHaven,

CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 107 (§ 16).60 SethMydans and Thomas Fuller, “Thai Leader Urges CalmAmidWidening Protests,”

New York Times, April 13, 2009, available online at ,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/world/asia/14thai.html. .

61 “Red Shirts to Call Off Bangkok Protest,” Al Jazeera, April 14, 2009, accessed fromLexisNexis.

62 Ibid.

Aesthetics of Protest 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

protestors in April of 2009 on a day that left two dead and over a hundredinjured.64 It only explains how the state can justify its role as the arbitrator oflegitimate violence. Self-defense of the individual urban resident became theimpetus for the contradictory offensive to defend the urban immune system.

The Red Shirt deployment of blood circulates within the ethics of the imagewhereby art is concerned with what Michael J. Shapiro calls violent cartographies,whereby “historically developed, socially embedded interpretations of identityand space” escalate the moral landscape of war and state violence.65 Treating filmslike John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Denis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land (2001), andEdouard Manet’s mid-nineteenth century painting The Execution of the EmperorMaximilian, Shapiro analyzes how the mediums of painting and cinemainterrogate the nation-state’s exclusion of foreign Others from modern space, nomatter how internal and natural these subjects are to its historical cartography.Similar strategies of mapping and boundary regulation, he observes, reinforce thespatial exclusions after 9/11. In the representational images of the War on Terror,the foregrounds and backgrounds, and the interiors and exteriors, operate aspolitical fault lines in geopolitical space. But the subjects of art (its characters,themes, and aesthetic), Shapiro argues, reveal the contours of violence lost in thesimplistic reasoning of state narratives, especially the ways the state targets bodiesas foreign. Within violent cartographies, “collectivities locate themselves in theworld and . . .practice the meanings of self and Other that provide the conditionsof possibility for regarding others as threats or antagonists.”66

Increasingly, the geopolitical logic of violence unfoldswithin the cartography ofthe global city. These urban-transnational border zones operate as points of imageand capital accumulation that challenge and reinforce the centrality of the nation-state. In 2008, the Thai army refused to clear Yellow Shirt protestors from theBangkok’s global corridor, Suvarnabhumi Airport, because their act was perceivedas a defense of the nation in light of the global excesses of the present.However, in aMay 2010military crackdown, theRed Shirtswere cleared from theirCentralWorldshoppingmall protest site, partly because theywere framed as foreign to the imageof fashion and finance attached to that particular “central” Bangkok space.By policing the image, the state is able to secure the proper interplay of meanings.For Shapiro, pedestrian bodies threaten the circulatory flow of the city and clashwith the prerogatives of the security regime of urban planning.

Among the subjectivity-creating political effects of the development of the new‘securescape’ is its construction of the pedestrian body as a threat rather than a civicparticipant. Certainly, the securescape-oriented design initiative has powerfulresonances with an earlier mode of urban securitization, Haussmann’s ‘works’ ofbroadened boulevards that replaced the narrow-streeted enclaves of Paris, with the‘aim of . . . securing the city against civil war’.67

Footnote 62 continued63 “Shirts of All Colours Bring Shame on Thailand,” The Nation (Thailand), April 17,

2009, accessed from LexisNexis.64Mark MacKinnon, “Riots Turn Deadly After Army Cracks Down,” The Globe and Mail,

April 14, 2009, accessed from LexisNexis.65Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. ix.66 Ibid., 11.

18 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

In the spring of 2010, the red-shirted pedestrian bodies of Bangkok were notperceived within the democratic order of peaceful assembly, but as invasivethreats to the security of the city. The economic security of tourism in the “world’smost heavily-visited city,” and the normative security of spatial codes were underthreat.68 Also, the city itself was perceived as a body, while the Red Shirts—as theThongchai Winichakul so observed at the time—were heavily objectified as germsinvading its sanitary membrane. It was as if the Internal Security Act declared onMarch 9th placed the city, as a body, into the temporary shelter of an allegoricalhospital, where the state could administer its health as certified medical officials.This line of thought commanded my attention when, that month, medical officialspronounced that some of the red shirts carried HIVand Hepatitis. Also, leaders incompeting street protest camps, if only indirectly, brought public health to theagenda. Dr Weng Tojirakarn of the Red Shirts was constantly on stage givingprognostic weight to his otherwise muddled speeches. Dr Tul Sithisomwong, wholed the middle to upper-class Network of Citizen Volunteers Protecting the Landin the call for the Red Shirts to end their protest, became the spokesperson forloyalist campaigns in Bangkok. Each of these leaders invoked their physicianstatus to enhance the standing of their political claims. The perception of securitydiscursively developed as a medical condition of the state as articulated inBangkok. The perceived invasion of the Red Shirts, an aesthetic border protectingthe health of the city, drove the enmity of security leading into the twincrackdowns of April 10 and May 19, 2010 and the less visible street battles thatraged after the initial militarization after the 2006 coup.

State enmity is a geopolitical norm often localized around the discourse of thebody because good health constitutes who belongs. Michel Foucault’s approach tomodern power in The Birth of the Clinic observes the shift from brute power to‘enlightened’ discipline, from the executioner to the medical practitioner thatinternalizes state discourse through prognosis on the health of the individualbody. Because the doctor can read what is not visible (such as symptomscontained within the subject), their authority equates with superior power in thehierarchy of privileged knowledge. Coincidentally, it was in the immediateaftermath of the French Revolution and the birth of a new order that this kind ofmedical knowledge validated the enlightened power of the state. The“disappearance of the sick man” meant the strategic visibility of a sanitizedmodern citizen-subject. In his gloss on Foucault, David Armstrong so notes that“this production of bodies was common to a range of techniques deployedthrough schools, prisons, workshops, barracks and hospitals.”69 Hospitals andassociations of doctors became preeminent institutions of the new order, not only

Footnote 66 continued67Michael J. Shapiro, “Managing Urban Security: City Walls and Urban Metis,” Security

Dialogue 40:4–5 (2009), p. 446. Shapiro is partially quoting from the work of WalterBenjamin who saw in the pedestrian the ability to transcend the constricting urbanarchitecture of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s anti-protest reform in nineteenth-century Paris. See also, Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 174.

68 “Shutting Down the Shutdown,” The Economist, March 2, 2014, available online at,http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2014/03/thailands-political-crisis. .

69 Robin Bunton and Alan r. Petersen (eds), Foucault, Health and Medicine (New York:Routledge, 1997), p. 20.

Aesthetics of Protest 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

extending the political to the cultural spaces of well-being, but allowing for thehospital to function as an analog of the state.

Foucault’s history of the medical gaze is particularly useful here not only inshowing how the health of the nation became located in the sickened body, but inhow surveillance and proper observation became the method for curing thenation. This institutionalization, in a Thai context, began in the media desire tolocate infectious diseases in the body of the protestors and culminated, onMay 19,2010, with the optical superiority of military snipers along the elevated platformsof the city. The medical gaze is militant and, literally, piercing. It is an aestheticplane within which it exerts, in Foucault’s words, a “violent rectitude . . . in orderto shatter, to lift, to release appearance.”70 Khattiya Sawasdipol (nicknamed SehDaeng, lit. “Red Commander”) was assassinated from the concealed perspectiveof an expansive Bangkok skyline as he gave his last interview to New York Timesreporter, Thomas Fuller. In the coming days, over 90 street protestors would fallvictim to the same militant gaze. Like the scope of soldiers who fight the diseasefrom unseen positions, the enmity calls for action. Here again, Foucault issues awarning. “The glance is silent, like a finger pointing, denouncing.”71 The UDDtactic of donating blood must be understood as a stain in the violent cartography,calling attention to their exclusion from the polis, and foregrounding the silence ofdeath within the medical gaze of the state.

Response: “Blood weakens a nation”

The reactions to the UDD’s week of voluntary bloodletting were driven both bythe official desire for a sanitary city and by a historical forgetfulness of all thatblood represents in the political imaginary of the street. Journalists, academics,and government officials interpreted the semiotics of blood as a literalweakening of the national body. Then Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, urgedthe Ministry of Health to send officials to educate protestors on the danger ofdrawing blood in public.72 A Royal Melbourne Institute of Technologyinternational business professor, Nattavud Pimpa, noted at the time, “What iscertain for now is this letting of blood weakens a nation. The pool of red will taketime, will and innovative approaches to cleanse.”73 Further stigmatizing theprotestors as physical threats to the well-being of the city, Thai news reports thatdoctors from the Medical Faculty at Bangkok University, and then MahidolUniversity’s Ramathibodi Hospital, tested the blood spilled at various sites andclaimed to find both the HIV virus, Hepatitus B, and Hepatitus C.74 The bloodtest results were submitted as a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office as theMedical Council of Thailand president, Somsak Lohlekha, moved to organize an

70 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, p. 121.71 Ibid.72 “Thai PM ExpressesWorry Over Protestor’s Health After Blood Drawing Is Planned,”

Xinhua News, March 15, 2010, available online at ,http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-03/15/c_13211871.htm. .

73Nattavud Pimpa, “Politics Written in Blood,” ABC (Australia), March 17, 2010,available online at ,http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/33212.html. .

74 “Vajira Analyzes Peasant Blood, Finds Aids Virus After Testing 20%,” ASTVManagerOnline, March 5, 2010, available online at ,http://www.manager.co.th/QOL/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID¼953. .

20 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

ethics panel to deliberate on any wayward doctors who assisted the protestors indrawing blood. There are many puzzles behind this argument, such as the ethicsor medical usefulness of blood tests on UDD protestors.75 These reports weremerely designed to spark fear and hostility, a government-driven enmity thatsoon progressed toward a justification for a war on one’s own citizens.

For the state, the forest invasion on the city, or the rural bannok infestation of theurban, signifies thepossibility of civilwar. “Civilwar” is translated inThai languageas songkramklangmeuang or “war in themiddle of the city.”76 The subsequent violentpolicies of the Center For the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES), whowaged a crackdown on protesters under the name “Operation reclaim space,” canthereby be understood as a an internal geopolitics modeled on the reappropriationof urban space. Spatial meanings not only invoked class antagonisms based oneconomic inequality, but redefined insiders and outsiders of the post-Coup order innew imagesof Bangkok.Bloodbecamea literal fault line of exclusion that connectedthe internal physiology of the body with the politics of the street. Two weeks afterthe April 10th military crackdown and two weeks before the May 19th crackdown,Thongchai Winichakul waged the timely argument that state enmity must beunderstood in both spatial and medical terms.77 At one level, the Red Shirts wereperceived as carriers of amoral disease, germs that quickly spreadduring themoraldecadence of the Thaksin era (2001–2006). Articulating a commonperception of theprotestors, Thongchai observed, “[t]he Reds are contagious with the Thaksindisease,” a corruption of the national political body.78 At another level, the redmarch on Bangkokwas perceived as an invasion of the city, an invasion to the heartof the urban middle class. Thongchai’s analysis highlighted an episode atChulalongkorn Hospital, at the corner of the UDD’s second protest site atRajprasongAvenue.79 Seizingupon rumors that thehospitalwas shelteringmilitaryassassins to snipe out protest leaders, a cadre of Red Shirts stormed the hospital toinvestigate.80While themedia core collectivelyprotested theRedShirt violation of areveredmedical facility, they remained silent on the April 10th crackdown onUDDprotestors. Thongchai suggests that the silence expresses the middle classperception of the city as a body undergoing treatment to ensure the spatial well-being of the state. Prophetically, he closes with an eerie observation.

75Apiradee Treerutkuarkul and Supoj Wansharoen, “No Proof ‘Bad Blood’ WasUDD’s,” Bangkok Post, April 3, 2010, available online at ,http://bangkokpost.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx. .

76Bannok, a reference to rural villagers, literally means “outer village” or “province”.77 Thongchai, “The ‘Germs’.”78 Ibid.79After the first military crackdown on April 10, 2010, the Red Shirts moved from the

Old City, where the history of the Thai polis is perceived to begin, to the New City wherefinancial and retail districts predominate. The move seemed to signal concerns for safetybecause the New City main stage at Rajprasong was highly visible from the BTS elevatedtransit system.

80 Even without evidence of a militarized hospital barracks, UDD suspicions werebolstered when the red shirt-aligned Khattiya Sawasdipol (known as Seh Daeng, “RedCommander”) was assassinated in the area by a sniper eleven days after Thongchai’s articlewas published online.

Aesthetics of Protest 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

The looming crackdownmight be seen as, and said to be, a sanitizing act, to stop theinfection caused by the invasion of the bannok into the political body in order torestore the health of the Thai moral political body.81

The Red Shirt ethics of blood threatened the nowmedicalized image of “highermoral purpose” he had written of two years earlier.82

Conclusion

The proliferation of articles, videos, and blogs help to piece together this violentperiod in a rotation that restores flashbacks of contentious battles for democracy toa discourse of Thai politics that too easily emphasizes Aristotle’s worst fear: that arabble-rousing underclass will over-run the stability of the political body with thehelp of an appointed demagogue. In such top-down narratives, the question ofwho “the people” of Thai politics actually are resounds in the question of whoenters the polis to deliberate. Democracy situates the state as no more than anarbitrator of the people, many of whom remain partitioned off from actual policy-making. While the moment of street politics is often considered the exception tothe institutional rules of nation-building, they are increasingly becoming the normin places like Istanbul, Rio, Cairo, Wall Street, Kiev, and Bangkok. At onedimension, these challenges find their settings along what Saskia Sassen calls “theglobal street.”83 On the global street, which in principle belongs to no one, thepeople of these global cities challenge and re-direct the circulation of an overlyrestrictive state body.84 In Bangkok, volunteering blood on the widely anticipatedeve of a military crackdown was about challenging the physiological gaze ofpolitics. The Red Shirts have shown that as states rely on the safety, security, andthe stability of its central sites as hubs for an interdependent global economiccommunity, this narrow notion of well-being requires an unhealthy degree ofviolence.

As a whole, the UDD’s street intervention is undermined by a kind of surface-level unity that can’t easily be overlooked. The “red shirts” of the Red Shirts arepliable signs, as temporary as any order of images in the visual economy of theglobal city. The Yellow Shirts that preceded them, and the conservative Networkof Citizen Volunteers Protecting the Land that donned the national colors of red,white, and blue, earning the tag “Multicolor Shirts,” called upon the Reds to endtheir protest and appropriated the visual artifice of color to wage a superficialpolitics of recognition. But these colors do not adequately represent the variety ofdivisions within the colored assemblage. Not everyone was urban, nor rural, nor asupporter of the ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Some attendedprotests because it was a means to challenge the state on issues not expressed inthe speeches that came from the stage. A chromatic politics of identity thereby

81 Thongchai, “The ‘Germs’.”82 Thongchai, “Toppling Democracy,” p. 28.83 Saskia Sassen, “The Global Street: Making the Political,” Globalizations 8:5 (2011),

pp. 573–579.84Georges Perec, a student of Henri Lefebvre, made this observation: “Contrary to

buildings, which almost always belong to someone, the streets in principle belong to noone.” Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 47.

22 Noah Viernes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015

falls prey to the aesthetics of the state body which demands a coherent “we-self”to fix a unified regime of citizenship.85 Its moral coherence reproduces the veryenmities it seeks to eliminate.

But against the thinness of the visual artifice in the politics of recognition inBangkok, the Red Shirt’s blood tactic moved from a direct identification of unity toone of “development.” The colors of the street politicsmiseen scenewere not a mereattempt to fix identification, but an assemblage of moving images and plotdevelopment, a transmission of signs that demand a return to what theymean andhow they affect the polity long after the event has ended. Red meant the historicviolence of the state body, whose medical gaze had isolated an invasive enmity.Red also meant the possibility of violence in the ongoing political saga. Tragically,the semiotics of blood materialized on April 10 and May 19, 2010 as militarysnipers occupied optimum positions at the vertical helm of the urban body. Themedical gaze restored the well-being of the city through ground swells of militarydeployment. The UDD had carefully juxtaposed politics and blood in an aestheticscenario which belonged to each of the protestors, and remained no lessvulnerable because of it. But beyond the violence that crystalizes historic politicalevents in death tolls, a Red Shirt politics of aesthetics raises a critical imaginationthat moves the terms of the polis above the prescriptions of state militancy.

Notes on contributor

Noah Viernes teaches politics, visual culture, and social movements in the GlobalStudies program at Akita International University in Akita, Japan. He has recentlypublished in South East Asia Research and the International Journal for the Semiotics ofthe Law, and is completing a book on Thai street politics through contemporaryfilm and literature.

85 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

Aesthetics of Protest 23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Kok

usai

Kyo

uyou

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

6:53

21

Janu

ary

2015