7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
1/21
This article was downloaded by: [Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile]On: 28 July 2012, At: 19:52Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Text and Performance QuarterlyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpq20
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless StateM. Lane Bruner
Version of record first published: 15 Aug 2006
To cite this article: M. Lane Bruner (2005): Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State, Text and Performance Quarterl
25:2, 136-155
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930500122773
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form toanyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses shouldbe independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims,proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with or arising out of the use of this material.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930500122773http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930500122773http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpq207/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
2/21
Carnivalesque Protest andthe Humorless State
M. Lane Bruner
Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, institutional forms of
oppression have periodically been defeated, transformed, or at least temporarily checked
by carnivalesque forms of public protest. After reviewing the political features of carnival
and the carnivalesque, along with several historical and contemporary examples of
carnivalesque political performances, this essay explores the possibilities for progressive
public transgression and the interrelationships among carnivalesque protest, critical
democratic citizenship, and state health.
Keywords: Carnival; Carnivalesque; Civil Disobedience; Corruption; Critical Theory;
Protest; Humor; Globalization
Hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask. (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelaisand His World 95)
Across the centuries, those on the losing ends of the political and economic spectrums
have periodically counteracted repressive forms of government with carnivalesque
forms of protest.1 These protests, history suggests, are particularly prevalent when
those benefiting from rampant political corruption lose their sense of humor, become
ridiculous in their seriousness, but are incapable, for one reason or another, of
silencing their prankster publics. There would appear to be important and ongoing
tensions, then, between the shifting humors of state agents and the productivecapacities of critical citizens, suggesting that a fuller appreciation for the dynamics of
those tensions is an important step in understanding how challenges to power can
result in positive political change.
ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) q 2005 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10462930500122773
M. Lane Bruner is currently Associate Professor of Critical Political Communication and Graduate Director of the
doctoral program in Public Communication in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in
Atlanta, Georgia. Correspondence to: M. Lane Bruner, Department of Communication, Georgia State University,
1052 One Park Place, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. Tel: 1 404-651-3465; Email: [email protected]
Text and Performance Quarterly
Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 136155
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
3/21
What, after all, constitutes humor in a state? Guy Debord, in his discussion of the
society of the spectacle, argues that the state neverhas a sense of humor, since the state
is always the ultimately unjust institutional site of law and order in the service of the
corruptly wealthy and powerful. In his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, for
example, Debord claims that it is always a mistake to try to explain something by
opposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals (67).2 However, even a cursory review
of political history reveals that different states at different times display a range of
humors, from sick totalitarian states that suppress critical forms of public
communication to healthy classical republican polities whose citizens enjoy a wide
range of rights and freedoms, particularly of speech and assembly. One could plausibly
argue that a states sense of humor is proportionate to the strength of citizens rights
and freedoms againstthe state, the general openness of government deliberations, thebreadth and depth of political dialogue, and the degree to which state officials are
legally constrained to tolerate public criticism. Rebellious citizenship, in fact, has often
been valorized by political theorists and practitioners as something essential for state
health. Around the time of the American Revolution, for example, it was commonly
claimed among Whig philosophers that mobs and tumults only happen when there
is a scandalous abuse of power, and, when revolts were moderate and not a threat
to constitutional order, Thomas Jefferson famously held that a little rebellion now
and then was a good thing (see Maier). From such a perspective, healthy (fun!)
states have citizens who are capable of considerable irony, have ways institutionally to
manage ambiguity and dissensus, have rich and actively turbulent public spheres, have
flourishing forms of parodic and/or critical public entertainments, and are led by
individuals encouraging critical citizenship. Conversely, sick and humorless states arepopulated by strict conservatives who crave certainty and discourage dissensus, have
anemic and passive public spheres, have bland and diverting forms of public
entertainments, and are led by individuals who repress critical citizenship.
Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, it is nevertheless the
case that institutional forms of oppression have sometimes been defeated,
transformed, or at least temporarily checked by carnivalesque protests, at least when
conditions are favorable. Unfortunately, conditions are rarely favorable. While it is
true that serious protests can sometimes reveal the unjust limits of corrupt states, as
exemplified by the civil rights movement in the United States, it is far more often the
case that direct and confrontational public protest is utterly crushed, as tragically
demonstrated by the massacre of Chinese activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It
would appear, then, that onlycertain kinds of laughter in certain kinds of situations arethe surest sign of state health (for surely there are situations faced by citizens and their
state representatives that demand sincere seriousness). Conversely, only certain kinds
of sober seriousness in certain kinds of situations mark the state in decay (for surely
there are situations in which agents of state power are unnecessarily serious in order to
mask their own incompetence or corruption). If this is true, what, precisely, are the
kinds of laughter and seriousness that tend to make states healthier or sicker? How are
we to understand political performance and the connections among performance,
politics, and humor, and what are some of the possible interrelationships among
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 137
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
4/21
progressive forms of carnivalesque protest, critical democratic citizenship, and state
health?
By first exploring the political features of carnival and the carnivalesque, and then
reviewing several historical and contemporary examples of carnivalesque protest to
ascertain the conditions required for its success, this essay seeks to address these and
other questions related to progressive public transgression. Ultimately I argue that
political corruption leads state actors to lose their sense of humor (i.e., as self-
interested factions begin to undermine the common interest they simultaneously
begin to stifle public critique and decry the principle of publicity in general), that there
are important civic lessons to draw from the similarities between critical political
theory and the carnivalesque, and that the most effective way of addressing state
corruption, at least under certain circumstances, is through the creative use ofcarnivalesque protest.3
The General Characteristics of Political Carnival
In many parts of the Western world today, for historical reasons related in large
measure to the Protestant Reformation, popular notions of carnival, when not
associated with Ferris wheels and stuffed animals, are associated with licentious
festivals such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carnival in Brazil. These diverting
entertainments and bawdy celebrations, however, have lost almost all, if not all, of their
former political character, and this loss of political relevance obscures the fact that the
history of carnival is a rich repository of an effective array of public political
performances.For those interested in civil disobedience and other productive forms of democratic
rebellion, a brief look back into history provides numerous examples of how
carnivalesque protest has been used to oppose, or at least temporarily relieve, various
forms of oppressive political culture.4 In ancient Rome, the festival of Saturnalia, a
direct precursor to carnival festivals in the Early Christian, medieval, and Renaissance
eras, provided a brief window of opportunity when hegemonic social roles were
reversed and usual restrictions on public behavior were officially relaxed, ultimately to
reinforce normal public ordera point to which I will return shortly.5 While early
Christian leaders such as Tertullian and John Chrysostom took themselves a bit too
seriously and condemned laughter as an influence of the Devil, during the Middle
Ages, and later during the Renaissance, itself the consequence of what Bakhtin refers to
as a carnivalization of human consciousness (Rabelais 273), religious and stateinstitutions provided holidays serving a similar carnivalesque function of reinforcing
social order by allowing its temporary subversion. While Protestant reformers did
their best to destroy the carnival tradition, associated as it was with a mixture of
Catholic and pagan rituals, it nevertheless continued to persist across Europe through
the eighteenth century, though less so in the United States.6 And while officially
sanctioned forms of political carnival (ritualized transgression for political purposes)
died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carnivalesque tactics reemerged in
surprising and dramatic fashion during the collapse of communism in Central
138 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
5/21
and Eastern Europe when employed by groups such as Orange Alternative in Poland
and the John Lennon Peace Club and the Society for a Merrier Present in the former
Czechoslovakia. More recently the term carnival and carnivalesque protest
techniques have been employed at anticorporate globalization protests in locations
ranging from Seattle, Washington, to Davos, Switzerland, by members of groups such
as Carnival against Capitalism, the Ruckus Society, Reclaim the Streets, and Art and
Revolution.
What are some of the politically consequential features of these various iterations of
political carnival and the carnivalesque? Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in their
review of contemporary scholarship on the topic, point out that the carnivalesque is
characterized by: (1) a potent, populist, critical inversion of all official words and
hierarchies; (2) the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, andprohibitions; (3) positive degradation and humiliation and an attitude of creative
disrespect; and (4) a temporary retextualizing of social formations that exposes their
fictive foundations (126).7
Stallybrass and White also stress the fact that carnival, in spite of its characteristic
role inversions and ambiguities, has often been used less as a means of temporary
social emancipation and progressive political critique than as a means of reinforcing
social control (1314). Lending qualified support to this perspective, Le Roy Ladurie,
citing the Spanish scholar Julio Caro Boroja, maintains that pre-Lenten carnival
festivals in sixteenth-century France were indeed ultimately designed by officials to
maintain local society in working order (311).8 That is, by permitting the temporary
suspension of the rules and norms governing everyday life, state officials assumed that
those rules and norms would afterwards acquire even greater force. Ladurie is quick toadd, however, that these motives were oftentimes subverted, and the desire to
maintain local society in working order was periodically transformed by political
subjects who used carnival festivities to critique government officials and state
institutions and demand significant political reform. Swiss history, for example, neatly
provides a series of such subversions, for popular carnivals were used to attack the
nobility in particular and the corruptly rich in general in the fourteenth century,
the Pope and Catholicism at the beginning of the Reformation, and Napoleon in the
nineteenth century (31112). Carnival, Ladurie concludes, was not simply about
enhancing social control, despite scholarly arguments to the contrary, but about
controlling control itself and modifying the society as a whole in the direction of
social change and possible progress (31316; italics in original).
The carnivalesque also displays temporal features with political ramifications. Thethree main features that mark the temporal dimensions of political carnival and create
temporary windows of opportunity for freedom from political subjection, according
to Edmund Leach, are masquerades, role reversals, and closing formalities: masks
signify a breaking away from ordinary time and entrance into fictive or sacred time via
anonymity and normal role loss; role reversalsor the turning of the world upside
downsignify a divine instance of group fusion as people enter liminal spaces where
normally highly disciplined social roles are temporarily exchanged or discarded; and
closing formalities (e.g., orderly processions, ritual reinstatement of officials) occur
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 139
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
6/21
at the end of the carnival period to signify a return to the normal world of humorless
repression where such politically consequential fictions as the divine right of kings,
state sovereignty, or free trade become real again. Therefore, opportunities for
controlling control, rather than simply living under controlled conditions, are
brief, and recognizing when the conditions are right is crucial for those seeking to
engage in humorous forms of protest: when the window of opportunity closes
carnivalesque humor, especially political consequential humor, is no longer tolerated
or welcome.
When putting these various features together, one finds that the historical notion of
political carnival looks something like this: pre-Christian festivals, mostly associated
with the agricultural calendar and the mysteries of death and rebirth, and comprised
of events that inverted hierarchies and temporarily suspended normal social rules,were eventually coopted by the Catholic Church. Carnivalesque features were woven
into various Church holidays, for example, and Carnival became a temporary time of
licentiousness before the sobering events of Lent and Easter. These were festive
holidays sanctioned by the state and the Church to allow the common people to let
off a little social steam while hopefully reinforcing the normal order of things. Such a
procedure is actually not so surprising a development from a theoretical perspective,
for, as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Terry Eagleton have each pointed out
in different ways, it is only through transgressions that social limits are revealed.
Official periods of sanctioned transgression are capable of magically reinforcing
the normal moral and political order by revealing the limits of that order in more
positive ways than outright physical and/or ideological repression.9 Political carnival,
therefore, is not only about the temporary suspension of the rules of everyday life butthe intentional inversion of normal order (e.g., the cart comes before the horse, the
mouse chases the cat, the wolf watches the sheep, children spank parents, slaves
become masters, commoners become kings) for a wide range of potential purposes
(e.g., to ritualize and thus pacify serious political protest, to release oneself from the
constraints of daily roles, to demand progressive political reform). People temporarily
are freed from their everyday identities by putting on masks and entering large crowds
(masquerades, pageants, parades), and, as Goethe points out in his Italian Journey,
they often prefer to put on very plain and common masks in order more effectively to
lose themselves in the crowd or more boldly to make collective political statements
(453). Therefore, while the inversion of hierarchies, the reversal of binaries, and the
wearing of masksall related in interesting ways, as we shall see, with critical political
theorycan serve to reinforce political order, they are also ultimately capable ofserving a much greater purpose: allowing subjects to enter a liminal realm of freedom
and in so doing create a space for critique that would otherwise not be possible in
normal society.
Before leaving this discussion of the political features of carnival and moving on to
discuss examples of carnivalesque protest illuminating the interrelationships among
humorless states, public humor, healthy political order, and the requisite political
conditions for progressive (as opposed to repressive) forms of protest, there is one
more crucial feature of the carnivalesque to address: the curious blending of the fictive
140 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
7/21
and the real. Briefly stated, during carnival festivities subjects of the realm are given a
certain license to pretend in ways that have real political consequencesand in an
odd parallel to the way that the elite are given license to pretend in ways that have
real political consequences outside of carnival.10 As Bakhtin observes, during carnival
people replace the everyday world with a symbolic/utopian world, and the truth of
that utopian world becomes a real existing force, and he provides the following
example to illustrate his point. During the diableries (i.e., devilish activities) related
to the medieval mystery plays it was customary to permit the devils to run loose
around the streets wearing their costumes; sometimes they were free to do so for
several days before the performance. . . . The actors, disguised as devils . . . considered
themselves exempt from the law . . . and took advantage of their role to rob the
peasants and mend their financial affairs (Rabelais 26566). These poor devils alsowere allowed to take revenge on people in the community who had taken advantage of
poor citizens, especially the corruptly rich and the selfish.11
Goethe, witnessing the carnival festival in Rome firsthand in January 1788, provides
an account of carnival that captures a wide range of its traditional features, including
the blending of the fictive and the real:
The Roman Carnival is not really a festival given for the people but one the peoplegive themselves. The state makes very few preparations for it and contributes next tonothing. . . . All that happens is that, at a given signal, everyone has leave to be asmad and foolish as he likes, and almost everything, except fisticuffs and stabbing, ispermissible. The difference between social orders seems to be abolished for the timebeing; everyone accosts everyone else, all good naturedly accept whatever happens tothem, and the insolence and license of the feast is balanced only by the universal
good humor (44647).
Goethe also observed that during the carnival mock battles would break out, but
sometimes these mock battles turn[ed] serious. Dealers in plaster bonbons (the
sugar coated almonds were too expensive for many) would run from one combatant to
the other, weighing out as many pounds as they asked for. There is no doubt that many
of these fights would have ended with knives being drawn if not for the instruments
of torture (state instruments placed there by the police) conveniently positioned
along the street to remind revelers not to press their fun too far (459). Here, then, as
with the poor devils, carnivalesque moments were used to act on certain
frustrations (e.g., love affairs gone wrong, revenge for former slights) that could not be
acted upon in the normal course of life.
Conversely, instead of the fictional eliding into the real, the reverse was also trueduring carnival. If you were a visitor from a foreign land who happened upon the
revelries in your native costume, for example, it was assumed that it was simply that: a
costume. So if a (real) Quaker (in everyday life) showed up at carnival wearing
traditional Quaker clothing, then surely this person was pretending to be Quaker. In
sum, during carnival everyone was considered to be pretending all of the time (as in
some senses we obviously are), and, as Goethe observed, strangers had to resign
themselves to being made fun of. . . for anyone marked down as a target . . . ha[d] no
chance of escape . . . [and to] defend oneself against teasing of this sort would
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 141
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
8/21
[have been] very dangerous, for the maskers [were] considered inviolable, and every
guard ha[d] orders to protect them (453 54). Thus it was that the fictional
temporarily took precedence over the real.
Sometimes such half-real pretending could turn deadly. Ladurie describes in great
detail a particular carnival festival in Romans, France, in 1580 (some 200 years before
Goethes observations and some 400 years before the carnivalesque collapse of
communism in Central and Eastern Europe) where the lower and middle classes were
in open political conflict with the upper classes. At the time, in this particular part of
France, the ruling elite had exempted themselves from paying their fair share of taxes,
thereby leaving the vast majority of the tax burden to the middle and lower classesa
clear example of political corruption, if the proper goal of politics is to protect the
common good.
12
As public and personal debts mounted, the wealthy nobles were morethan happy to loan money to the poor, and as a result of the lower classes being
responsible for funding all public services, while those most able to pay were exempt,
the burden slowly became unbearable.
During the carnival festivities in 1580 Romans, therefore, and taking advantage of
the temporary suspension of the draconian rules that dominated their lives, the poor
citizens of the city held separate events from the rich, and the symbolism on both sides
was clear enough: the theme for the poor peoples carnival was eat the rich, for the
rich of the town have grown fat at the expense of the poor. In the poor peoples
parades they carried rakes and brooms (symbolizing their desire to sweep away the
rich), they cried flesh of Nobles for six deniers a pound, and they held mock military
parades complete with mock weapons.13 On the better side of town the rich began
their carnival festivities by passing a law, through their carnival King (a mock King,chosen secretly in advance, and given the very real right to pass enforceable laws, if
only for a few days), that bad food would be expensive and good food would be
cheap (a slam on the poor peoples pretensions to power). However, on Mardi Gras,
February 15, the rich of the town, in their masks, crossed the line between fiction and
fact and massacred the leaders of the poor peoples carnival, and after the official
return of law and order they publicly tortured and hanged the remaining rebel
leaders and massacred thousands of peasants in the nearby countryside: not very
humorous at all (21828).
Here we have a clear case of the humorless state in action. Laduries example, distant in
time as it is, provides clear evidence in support of the thesis that corrupt governments,
populated by people wanting to use political power to maintain their unjust advantages,
have a very limited sense of humor and stifle public critique to maintain their status. It alsosupportsthe early classical republican theory that subjects usually rebel only whenthere
is a scandalous abuse of power. If the nobles had been willing to carry their fair share of
the public burden, then the common people would likely never have rebelled or, to be
more precise, would never have performed their mock rebellion. Nevertheless, since the
poor dared humorously to challenge the nobles authority, the nobles decided to
retaliate by violently decimating the ranks of the poor.
While the nobles used the reversal of hierarchies, masks, and other trappings of
carnival for deadly serious purposes, there were many humorous performances on the
142 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
9/21
part of the poor. Ladurie argues that the poor of Romans were not planning a
serious revolutionif they had it would have been doomed to failbut instead
simply wanted to take the opportunity of the carnival festival to voice their very real
grievances over corruption in government through comic performances. For
example, the main rebel leader, the first to be murdered, appeared at a city hall meeting
and took the seat of a nobleman right after carnival began wearing nothing but a bear
skin. At the time, the bear was symbolically equal to the groundhog that appears today
in late winter to decide if spring will arrive early or not. In making this gesture, the
rebel leader, according to Ladurie, probably meant to perform his hope that there
would soon be an end to the long winter of corruption in city hall. While other
instances could be cited, the point here is that the poor used carnival as an opportunity
to poke fun at the rich, while the rich used carnival to murder the poor.In 1580 Romans, then, carnivalesque protest obviously did not work, and the events
exemplify how humorous public gestures, in certain conditions, prove incapable of
successfully combating state corruption. Fortunately other, more contemporary,
examples of carnivalesque protests against communism in Central and Eastern Europe
in the late 1980s and against corporate globalization at the dawn of the twenty-first
century help to clarify the conditions in which such protests can succeed.
Carnivalesque Protests and Their Windows of Opportunity
Just as Jurgen Habermas suggests that a critical (bourgeois) public emerged in various
states in Western Europe only when the previously unchecked power of the monarchs
was temporarily offset by the rising power of the merchant classes, it appears thatcarnivalesque protest only succeeds when there are checks and balances in state
power.14 Furthermore, the windows of opportunity for carnivalesque protest quickly
close when either the temporary balance of power is upset (leading to a new round of
oppression), or after the carnivalesque protests are successful and the ridiculous
nature of state pseudoseriousness is replaced with a healthy seriousness, and/or
when pseudodialogue is replaced with more sincere forms of dialogue. Two specific
instances of carnivalesque protest nicely illustrate these points: Orange Alternatives
protest in Wrocaw, Poland, over the course of the 1980s, and Ben Whites turtle
tactics at the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in late 1999. 15 While scores
of similar events took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and
continue to take place during anticorporate globalization protests, these two instances
are typical and usefully exemplify when, where, why, and how carnivalesque protesttactics work and do not work.
As is well known, under the communist governments of Central and Eastern Europe
public protest simply was not allowed: the Soviet Union, for example, used military
force to suppress public protests against communist totalitarianism in East Germany,
Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia. However, by the mid 1980s, due in
large part to economic stagnation in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated
internal liberalization under the slogans of glasnost (openness) and perestroika
(reconstruction). Unfortunately, at least for Gorbachev, instead of solving the problems
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 143
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
10/21
of communism, these reforms opened the way for more open criticisms of the obvious
failures of the Soviet system.16 An even earlier event that brought critical publicity to the
Soviet Union arguably paved the way for these later changes: the Helsinki Accords,
reached in 1975, which contained human rights provisions providing unprecedented
opportunities for Soviet dissidents to report human rights violations to the
international community (Keck and Sikkink 24). Together, these and other changes
created new opportunities for Soviet satellite countries as they struggled to determine
the right amount of reform, but certainly not reform allowing for open protest. The
growing political balance between hard-liners and reformers over the proper pace of
primarily economic reforms, however, created a unique opportunity for carnivalesque
forms of protest, as Padraic Kenney illustrates in his detailed account of the protests that
occurred across Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (158 91). While openlyserious protest against communist governments continued quickly to lead to beatings
and arrests, though not nearly so often or severe as during the height of the Cold War
(which technically did not end until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), protests
characterized by carnivalesque featuresthe blending of the fictive and the real, the use
of popular forms of humor, the inversion of hierarchies, and so forthmet with
increasing success, and the antics of Orange Alternative in Poland exemplify this fact.
Beginning in 1981, when state oppression against the labor movement Solidarity
was quite severe (martial law had been imposed), about the only way to publicly
protest against corruption in government was through graffiti. When the police would
paint over Solidarity graffiti, they would leave misshapen blobs on the walls, and
members of Orange Alternative, led by Waldemar Fydrych, known comically as Major
Fydrych, would decorate those blobs with hats, arms, and legs, turning them into littleelves. At first, the symbols, in carnivalesque fashion, were both anonymous and
ambiguous, but they were nevertheless publicly visible alterations to otherwise
obvious erasures on the part of the state, for state security forces did not find
Solidarity very funny at all. In 1982, during the May Day celebrations, members of
Orange Alternative dressed up in ridiculous costumes, rented a bus, went to the local
zoo, and waved red flags and sang communist songs while ironically demanding
freedom for the bears, the bear being an obvious Soviet symbol. Although the
protesters were arrested, they were so ridiculous that the police refused to fine them,
particularly because it was difficult to know where to draw the line when it came to this
obscure kind of political performance. Additionally, because the government wanted
to take advantage of its newfound ability to distance itself from direct Soviet
intervention in local economic and political affairs, officials did not want to be seen asreturning to the more openly brutal political oppression of the past.
State authority, particularly in light of its own increasingly liminal position, proved
nearly helpless in the face of such carnivalesque absurdities, which continued with
increasing intensity as the public slowly began to recognize that they could get away
with quite a bit using such tactics. On Childrens Day in 1987, over a thousand young
Polish citizens took to the streets of Wrocaw dressed as elves, embodying the
symbolism of the graffiti from seven years earlier. They handed out candy and sang
childrens songs. Major Frydrych, who had the habit of comically dressing as a Soviet
144 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
11/21
military official, was arrested immediately, but as the police also began to arrest elves,
the large crowd that had gathered began to chant Elves are real! The arrested elves
danced, kissed police officers, then threw candy out of the windows of police vans as
they were driven away (although they were quickly released without penalty), and the
images of these events were later broadcast across the entire country, symbolizing a
kind of surreal immunity from repression through foolishness (Kenney 160).
The comic symbol of protest eventually became the Smurfs. These popular cartoon
characters, blue elves appearing weekly on Polish television (a cultural import from the
United States) performing deeds of brotherly love and bravery to rescue one another
from harm, were ironically identified with the police (blue was the color of their
uniforms and vansthe opposite of orange). Over time, protesters began greeting the
police as Smurfs, and yet, given the carnivalesque nature of these symbols, when MajorFydrych was released from prison and appeared at the Childrens Day festivities the
following year (1988) he was hailed as Papa Smurf: the fool had become the
carnival king.
Of course, there were serious protests devoid of humor in Poland as well, but usually
they only involved disgruntled and brave labor organizers and university students. Yet
changing the mind of the public, emboldening them to participate in political carnival,
was precisely what Orange Alternative was all about. According to Fydrych, Orange
Alternative happenings were places to learn opposition and to discover more
political forms of protest. He argued, The Wrocaw street slowly ceases to fear, and
through participation in the fun, people learn to support more serious [protest] . . .
[and slowly the] fear of detentionusually for a few hours, without serious
consequencesevaporates (Kenney 190). It was, as Kenney remarks, a kind ofsocialist surrealism as sociotherapy.
As ever broader cross sections of the public began to join with the workers and
students in these carnivalesque protests, it soon became clear that the government
could not last for long, especially given the growing tensions and balance between
hard-liners and reformers over liberalization policies both in the Soviet Union and in
Poland, with the latter country being poised to lead the way for other Central and
Eastern European countries due to its relatively democratic past. By 1989 communism
was all but dead in Poland, and suddenly the prankster protests stopped. The corrupt
representatives of the ridiculous puppet state had now been replaced by elected
representatives, and public mobilization began to occur not through carnival but
through forms more typical in market democracies (e.g., public relations, advertising,
political speech). The window on carnivalesque protest in Poland had briefly openedand now was closed.
Ten years later, however, the window of opportunity for carnivalesque protest
suddenly opened again in what for many people was a highly unlikely place: the United
States. By most estimates, over 60,000 citizens representing over 600 national and
international nongovernment organizations flooded the streets of Seattle to disrupt an
international meeting of trade ministers, executive state representatives and corporate
elites. Janet Thomas, in her book on the 1999 protest against the World Trade
Organization (WTO), called it a carnival of cause (12). But what cause? The simple
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 145
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
12/21
and most common answer: creeping global corporate rule, and the insidious
destruction of global democracy by market fundamentalists.
Interestingly enough, and much unlike the situation in the post-9/11 era, there was
growing indecision in the executive branch during the last years of the Clinton
administration over the direction of global trade policy, and the state had not yet
developed the wide range of measures it now has at its disposal for stifling public
dissent (e.g., protest free zones, loyalty oaths, homeland security, the surveillance
measures contained in the Patriot Act). Instead, at the time, and given mounting
public pressure against the negative impacts of economic globalization, Clinton had
begun delivering speeches across the country arguing that, while he believed that freer
trade led to greater economic prosperity, the world needed to change course to achieve
globalization with a human face (Council; New York). Clintons discourse,however, failed to stem economic globalizations negative impacts on organized labor,
the environment, and local forms of democracy. When the WTO decided to hold its
international meeting in Seattle, in a section of the United States jokingly referred to as
the Left Coast populated by a wide range of civic activists with considerable
experience in fighting for environmental justice and labor rights, some kind of clash
was inevitable.
Despite the slight and apparently temporary erosion of confidence in what has
commonly been referred to as the Washington Consensus (i.e., the belief on the part
of both Democrats and Republicans that free markets are good and big
government is bad), this certainly did not mean that any and all forms of peaceful
public protest would be allowed. Officials had already decided that massive public
assemblies blocking the streets and delegate access to the WTO events would not betolerated, although this was precisely the goal of the protest organizers. As a result, and
as the images broadcast across the country showed, the events in Seattle were marked
by considerable vandalism on the part of anarchists and significant violence on the
part of police. Still, in the middle of this sea of political conflict, and located on several
key intersections in downtown Seattle, was a small band of turtle people who
managed to avoid the brunt of the vandalism and violence.
The idea for the turtle people was the brainchild of Ben White of the Animal Welfare
Institute, mainly as a reaction to the fact that the WTO court had overturned a US law
passed in 1996 banning the sale of shrimp caught in nets that killed endangered sea
turtles. The WTO courts reasoning was that the law constituted an unfair barrier to
trade. White thought that a public performance by turtle people could send a
number of important symbolic messages. The ban on certain shrimp nets had beeninitiated through traditional democratic channels in the US by nongovernment
organizations such as the Earth Island Institute, the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society of the US, and the Sierra Club
(Thomas 18). However, because unelected courts in newly empowered international
government organizations designed to enforce free trade were (and are) now able to
overturn the laws of nation-states, the turtle people wanted to provide a street theater
spectacle to draw attention to this new and relatively unknown form of corporate
global governance.
146 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
13/21
After a week of what turned out to be extremely popular teach-ins organized by the
International Forum on Globalization concerning the negative impacts of globalization,
on Tuesday, November 30, 1999, the opening day of the WTO meetings, White gathered
together 250 individuals who had volunteered to become turtle people. Gathering at a
local church, and having to turn over 100 potential turtle people away, White went over a
number of turtle obligations before handing over the costumes he had prepared. After
noting the characteristics of turtleslong-lived, patient, placid, gentlehe first told the
group that if they encountered any kind of violence whatsoever they were to stop and
surround it withpeaceful turtle power. Second, he announcedthat if anyonedid anything
aggressive they would be de-turtled on the spot, and this included any use of hostile
language. Third, he told the group to comport themselves like turtles: as ancient
repositories of wisdom they should not fight back if provoked by police protecting theircorporate clients. Fourth, they were asked to return their costumes to the church so the
next days planned civil disobedience actions could proceed as scheduled. Finally, he
announced that their job was quietly to block major downtown intersections leading to
the WTO conference in order to prevent delegates from attending.
Throughout the day, the turtle brigade was the antithesis of an angry, strident
protest, and the image of the lowly and peaceful turtles taking on the power of
multinational corporations and free trade ideologues dominated media images across
the country (Thomas 23-28). Not only did they appear on the cover of Newsweek, their
images also prominently appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the
Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and on CNN (to name a few).
Conversely, a serious protest at a downtown McDonalds by French farmer Jose Bove
was marked by vandalism and violence, and, while the serious protest blocked theturtles return to the church, all 250 costumes were duly returned on time.
Needless to say, even though the turtles were relatively safe during the proceedings,
other participants, such as those from the Direct Action Network, who invited people to
join their Festival of Resistance, were not so lucky (Thomas83 87). Eventhough direct
action activists claimed they would be engaging in street theater and would be
nonviolent, not be verbally or physically abusive, not carry weapons or drugs, and not
destroy property, when they went to block intersections downtown they were quickly
assaulted by police forces. The members of Direct Action Network, although surrounded
by jugglers, drummers, big puppets, the radical cheerleaders, and Santa Clauses, . . . used
chicken wire, duct tape, PCV piping, chains and padlocks to secure themselves together
whentaking over the intersection (Thomas 85). As opposedto the intersections where the
turtles were, where people lovedit, the cops loved it, bystanders lovedit (Thomas 28), atractor with a scoop turned onto the street and headed for the serious protesters. Police
lifted the protective bandanas worn by locked-down protesters who were sitting in the
street andsquirtedpepper spray directly into their eyes. . . rubber bulletsbruised the backs
of retreating demonstrators [and] cans of tear gas were thrown (Thomas 86 87). While
the various events had successfully thwarted the WTO meetings for the day, the
government quickly announced there would be a 7:00 p.m. curfew that night, and the
following day there would be a sixty block protest free zone around the WTO
Conference headquarters.
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 147
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
14/21
Clearly, the festival of resistance of the Direct Action Network was not received,
nor covered in the media, at all like the turtle people were. As Thomas notes, many of
the protesters had a sense of humor. Some of the protesters, and most of the police, did
not. There were cops in all-black uniforms, complete with black capes . . . more
science fiction-looking than even the military. This wasnt the clean-cut-looking
National Guard from the 60s (68). On the other side were the puppets, the Raging
Grannies, the Ruckus Society, Santa Clauses, etc., mostly singing, dancing, joking, and
having fun. Strangely enough, perhaps, they were relatively safe, whereas the serious
protesters obviously were not. Sure enough, besides the coverage happily given to the
turtles, the preponderance of coverage in the national media characterized the protest
as an irrational outburst by radicals. The serious protesters had in fact unwittingly
played directly into the hands of the market logic of the mass media: if it bleeds it leads.As one protester put it:
How can I describe the television news coverage? How would a sports enthusiast feelif he tuned in to see the big game and the entire coverage was focused on the guyselling peanuts? [T]he coverage was a veil that missed or minimized everysubstantive issue, diverting attention to the violence or threat of violence in thestreet. (Thomas 69)
Newspaper coverage did not do much better, generally characterizing the protesters as
being against trade, per se, not against what they considered to be unfair trade policies.
The important distinction between antiglobalization protest and anticorporate
globalization protest was ignored or overlooked.
While the events in Seattle were certainly dramatic, it was only a matter of timebefore order was restored. Today, in the post-9/11 era, the lessons learned by the
state are now in evidence at every major public protest against corporate global rule:
summits are held at fortified and isolated locations, permits for marches and
gatherings are denied, protesters are sequestered from protest free zones and herded
(often fenced) into protest zones, thereby segregating protesters from the target of
their protests, and police presence is overwhelming. While the window of opportunity
for carnivalesque protest at anticorporate globalization protests has perhaps not closed
completely, it is surely the case that those in support of global corporate rule would like
it to close. Regardless, unlike the situation in Poland (and the rest of Central and
Eastern Europe), where comic protest was eventually successful in contributing to
substantive political reform, the same is certainly not true when it comes to corporate
globalization.These two examples, limited as they are, suggest that the humorless state has a very
difficult time dealing with absurdity, symbolic protest, and the curious blending of the
fictive and the realpeople becoming turtles, elves becoming realbut it has much
less trouble violently dealing with more serious forms of protest. And perhaps this
has always been true. Rabelais, the subject of Bahktins book on the carnivalesque, was
well known for masking his critique of the existing political order of his day with
humor and was, therefore, safe from Church oppression. Conversely, other critics of
his time were burned at the stake for saying less controversial things seriously. Within
148 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
15/21
the carnival, as elves are carted away in police vans throwing candy and singing
communist songs and as turtle people peacefully waddle down the streets, there is a
certain absurdity to violent state reactions. Images of cute little elves being beaten by
police or passive turtles being scooped up by tractors do not make for very good press
if you represent the state. But it makes for excellent press if you are a protester (see
Deluca and Peeples). Conversely, images of serious protesters angrily vandalizing
corporate property or yelling at police make excellent press for the state, displaying as
they do the seriousness of the situation. This is not to suggest that the elves or the
turtle people were fully aware of the media potential of their activities (although they
may have been), but politically progressive activists could nevertheless learn a great
deal by taking note of this difference.
Humor, Corruption, and Critical Theory
It is of course difficult to laugh in the face of danger. When hundreds of police and
military personnel are lined up in their riot gear with weapons aimed at you, it is
difficult to dance or sing. The natural human reaction of those oppressed by what they
consider to be unjust forces of order is to fight back: after all, that is what justice is all
about. Or is it? This brings us back to the questions that opened this essay: what specific
kinds of humor and seriousness best reflect the healthy state? Under what specific
conditions does humor help to overcome corruption, and when does it fail? When is it
appropriate and just for the state to get serious, and when is its seriousness
laughable? It is the way we approach this last question that helps to answer the rest.
First of all, carnivalesque protest is simply not possible if the state is so oppressivelyhumorless that it utterly eliminates all public opposition. The singing and dancing elf
can simply be taken away at night and dropped into the ocean with weights on his or
her feet, as in 1970s Argentina. However, even in these conditions there might be
certain forms of public protest (on the part of the very elderly or the very young, for
example) available to the oppressed. There must be, to borrow a phrase from social
movement theory, opportunity structures in place in order for public political
performances to occur at all. Put simply, whether or not a state has open or closed
opportunity structures depends on how porous they are to social organizations
(Khagram, Rikker, and Sikkink 17). Liberal (social) democracies tend to be the most
porous, whereas conservative (market) democracies tend to be less porous, and
totalitarian and fundamentalist regimes tend to be the least porous. Arguably, then,
this is perhaps the main criterion for gauging the sense of humor of the state: thefirst type being the funniest, the second type being less funny, and the third type not
being funny at all.
But how does a state come to possess its particular sense of humor? Is it related to
the degree of poverty in a state, the degree of disparity between the rich and the poor,
levels of education, or something else? It is historically the case that the poorest states
usually have the most repressive governments, but this is not always true. Nazi
Germany, for example, and Imperial Japan provide obvious antimodels. Is it the
preponderance of military and/or economic power? It is historically the case that states
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 149
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
16/21
with the greatest freedom of expression have usually been wealthy empires with
extensive colonies such as Athens, Rome, Britain, France, and the United States.
From a world systems perspective, one could argue that only the core (rich, capital
acquiring) states can afford the luxury of free speech, while semiperipheral countries,
dependent as they are for their middle class status on the good will of the core
countries, must repress speech to keep that good will. The peripheral countries, or the
lower class countries, then, could be expected to have no free speech at all. 17 Class
issues have certainly played a central role in carnivalesque protest across the centuries,
but can state humors be reduced to hard economic and military power?
There is a growing body of literature to suggest that soft power, or the power of
persuasion, also plays a major role in the humors of states (Crawford; Florini; Keck
and Sikkink; Kenney). That is, changing the ways people think changes the kinds ofcommunities they create. While this may seem an obvious point to communication
scholars, it is far from self-evident to many so-called realists in international
relations and rationalists in economics. Within this soft power paradigm, it is not
the wealth or power of a state that determines its sense of humor, but the degree to
which that state is either just or corrupt, where a just state is conceived as one that
concerns itself with establishing the rule oflaw in defense of the common good, and a
corrupt state is conceived as one that concerns itself with establishing the rule bylaw in
defense of the self-interest of a fraction of the people. However, it is nevertheless the
case that, from a political-philosophical point of view, since states today are always
self-interested, insofar as their view of the common good generally ends at their
own borders, we are doomed to live in a world of relatively humorless and corrupt
states, since an ideally humorous and just state would have to be concerned with thetruly common, that is universally common, good. This in turn brings up several issues
related to critical political theory that happen to overlap in interesting ways with the
carnivalesque.
As Bakhtin and Nietzsche have argued, the quest for certainty and/or perfect
representation is usually a symptom of decline (Bakhtin, Rabelais 115, 258, 426 27;
Nietzsche, 246 57). As Nietzsche repeatedly noted, for example, language is essentially
metaphorical, and Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are
illusions (250). Nietzsche, however, was far from despairing over this fact, and
believed that Truths are not only politically consequential fictions but absolutely
necessary for human lifethus his notion of the art of living as the art of creating the
best fictions possible. This is a far cry from Platos insistence that ideas are the greatest
reality, followed by the secondary reality of things, the tertiary reality of words,and the dangerously fictitious nature of poetry and rhetoric. Inverting Plato,
Nietzsche argues that all language, therefore all knowledge, has poetic and rhetorical
dimensions. Bakhtin, like Foucault, politicizes this perspective to show how the
seriousness of correct interpretation and representation (the Certain meaning, the
perfect Representation) is anything but funny: torturers, jailers, the police, military
officials, and others who are certain that what they are doing is right reveal this
every day. Therefore, there is a very interesting and thoroughgoing relationship
between language in use and political formations, both ideational and institutional.
150 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
17/21
Many critical theorists have pointed out how the quest for an unquestionable and
nonambiguous identity, especially when that quest is at the expense of an adequate
appreciation for the constitutive role of language, leads to forms of seriousness that by
definition lead to violence.18 Such quests invariably are shipwrecked on their own
false seriousness. While Sigmund Freud argued that civilization itself was built upon
the foundation of psychic repression, critical theorists seek to investigate a politics based
on an incessant interrogation of this false seriousness in order to attain more
democratic, just, and peaceful forms of seriousness. True, open seriousness requires a
critical form of consciousness that embraces what Dana Villa has referred to as Socratic
citizenship,19 Foucault has called a limit attitude (Enlightenment), Debord has
called detournement (Society 144 46), Jacques Derrida has called deconstructive
justice,
20
and what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have called radicaldemocracy. All these concepts relate to the political necessity, if one wants to avoid the
kinds of violence that arise when people valorize the representative features of language
and overlook the constitutive dimensions of language, for creating forms of political
action that constitute incessant critiques of essentialism. As expressed by Bakhtin:
True open seriousness fears neither parody, nor irony, nor any other form of reducedlaughter, for it is aware of being part of an uncompleted whole . . . it does not denyseriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, fromthe intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fearand intimidation. (Rabelais 12223)
Arguably, the carnivalesque is a resource of political action that resonates with the
above-listed notions, most importantly because it destabilizes the kinds of certaintiesthat lead to political illness, especially as manifested in forms of the humorless state.
There are several lessons, then, to be drawn from this brief exploration of
carnivalesque political performance. First, democracy and humor in a state tend to
develop when there is a persistent and effective balance of powers. As political theorists
across the ages have argued, the principal problem with statecraft is how to maintain
that precarious balance, for when it is upset and power is concentrated in the hands of a
particular faction the health of the state deteriorates rapidly as self-interest overwhelms
the truly popular (general) interest. Second, there also appear to be windows of
opportunity in corrupt states, if opportunity structures are in place for the expression of
popular unrest, for progressive forms of carnivalesque protest or forms of protest that
use ambiguity and humor to undermine the false seriousness of the self-interested.
However, those windows quickly close when opportunity structures evaporate (e.g.,when civil liberties are restricted for the purposes of homeland security) or when
protests are successful enough to transform government progressively in ways that
reinforce the balance of power (thus making festive humor less necessary). Third, so
long as states are only concerned with their own common good they are inscribing a
humorless limit on the truly common good of the international community; yet
undermining local democratic processes through the forced interventions of
international government organizations designed to protect only a fraction of the
worlds population is not a viable alternative to global democracy either.
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 151
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
18/21
Perhaps a final example might help to summarize the difficulties that surround
putting carnivalesque techniques into practice. Before the attacks on the United States
on 11 September 2001, large numbers of protesters were on the streets to voice their
displeasure over what they believed were the antidemocratic practices involved in
corporate globalization. After those attacks, however, the United States indeed faced a
serious crisis: thousands of innocent people had been murdered, and the risk of
further terrorist attacks on the United States could not be denied. This was, and
remains, a truly serious problem. One result of those attacks, however, was increased
security measures and a reduction of civil liberties in the United States. Other results
stemming from a nondemocratic global governance structure, however, were the
continuing drain of high paying manufacturing jobs overseas, the dilution of the
powers of organized labor, the further decimation of the middle class (which politicaltheorists of the classic republican stripe have always argued is key to the health of any
republic due to a broader distribution of wealth and opportunity), few serious brakes
being put on corporate rule, and, therefore, an even greater threat of terrorism. It was
no coincidence, after all, that the World Trade Center was attacked.
In the wake of these events, political protests have continued. The Republican
convention in 2004, for instance, attracted over 500,000 activists, many engaging in
carnivalesque tactics. Therefore, on the one hand, following Jefferson, we could
assume that some scandalous abuse of power continues to take place. On the other
hand, many citizens of the United States are clearly willing to trade some of their civil
liberties for more security. But what constitutes political security? Arguably, political
security today would first require a thoroughgoing and fully public investigation into
the causes of terrorism against the United States and around the world.Second, limiting government to the concerns of us versus them is clearly no
solution in our increasingly globalized world. Yes, we must protect ourselves, but
arguably the surest way to protect ourselves is to help make the entire worlda safer, a
more just, and a more wealthy place. While the rhetoric of free trade would
(erroneously) suggest that freer trade and fewer constraints on corporations would
automatically lead to greater prosperity for all (the rising tide lifts all boats), a different
ideology might suggest that debt reduction worldwide, less unilateral military action,
tied as it has almost always been in the United States with corporate colonialism, and
other similar measures would make the world a happier place.
Third, obviously all forms of political totalitarianism and fundamentalism cannot
be tolerated, thus a delicate balance must be struck between global democracy and
nation-building, a much more delicate balance than currently exists. As BenjaminBarber and Slavoj Zizek have both pointed out in different ways, both corporate
globalization and terrorism are antidemocratic forces with little interest in promoting
democracy, and the current populist Right forces that currently hold power in the
United States and (some parts of) Europe are primarily concerned to ensure that
anticapitalist critiques and movements toward democratic socialism are effectively
stifled. How, then, to promote the ability of local populations to organize
democratically in the face of corporate globalization and tribal responses to market
fundamentalism remains a daunting challenge in the near term.
152 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
19/21
How we help to create conditions allowing citizens of the world to meet the
challenges to statecraft in the twenty-first century, especially the politically
consequential fictions of national identity and sovereignty and the scourges of
market fundamentalism and terrorism (and all the other certainties afflicting world
order), is one of the greatest questions, if not the greatest question, of our time.
As radical democratic political activists seeking the path to a more just world order,
using all the critical techniques at our disposal to unmask the humorless state
constitutes useful steps toward that goal and equally useful steps away from the
masquerade of corrupt politics.
Notes
[1] The literature on carnival and the historical importance of the carnivalesque is vast. For an
excellent bibliography see Ladurie 41326.
[2] Despite his cynicism toward political order, Debord nevertheless has a number of important
things to say about the economic unconscious of market societies and the function of capitalist
spectacle.
[3] My notion of corruption is borrowed from radical Whig philosophies such as those of
Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon. For introductions to these
philosophies and their impact on British and American political thought, see Jacobson;
Pockock 462 552.
[4] There have of course been other types of humorous protest that were not carnivalesque. In
Ancient Athens, for example, the comic theater was a rich source for political expression, and
political satire has long been a staple of politics in the United States. For useful descriptions of
the relationship between Greek theater and critical political speech, see Stone 13437, 21824.
For a discussion of the history of laughter and the important differences between carnivalesque
humor and satire, see Bakhtin, Rabelais 59-144.
[5] Many features of the pagan festival of Saturnalia were transformed by the Early Church into
holidays such as Christmas (see Laing 62 65).
[6] For a brief discussion of early Protestant attitudes toward the carnival tradition, see Ladurie
3089. Regarding carnival in the United States, Morgan persuasively argues that elections in
early US history served a carnivalesque political function (196208).
[7] Kenneth Burkes work on the comic frame is similar in many ways, though not equivalent, to
the carnivalesque (see Burkes Attitudes and Carlsons Limitations and Ghandi).
[8] Terry Eagleton and others have also focused on the controlling dimensions of officially
ritualized protest.
[9] For useful reviews of Nietzsches and Foucaults theories of transgression and limit, see Simons;
and Foucaults essays What is Enlightenment? and Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.
[10] One could plausibly argue that everyday life is carnival in reverse: the hierarchies, binaries,pretensions, masks are just as fictional, but they take on the quality of the real because the
fictions are made real through the effects of power.
[11] This example also helps to explain the image on the cover of Stallybrass and Whites The Politics
and Poetics of Transgression, which shows masked devils beating a man with clubs as other
masked revelers look on with obvious enjoyment.
[12] The anticorporate globalization protests are similarly focused on how the elites are becoming
rich by placing the tax and debt burdens on the lower and middle classes of the world (thus
their explicit critiques of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), and the
attacks on communism in Eastern Europe were just as much attacks on the political elites who
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 153
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
20/21
managed information flows and the centralized economies to their own benefit and to the
detriment of everyday people.
[13] Mock battles were also waged by Orange Alternative in Poland in the late 1980s (see Kenney
16064).
[14] While Habermas work has been roundly criticized for failing to account for the marginalizing
tendencies of the bourgeois public spherecomposed as it was by the elite white male
beneficiaries of colonialismit is nevertheless a very useful text for exploring the relationship
between balances of power and the possibilities for critical citizenship. For important critiques
of Habermas theory of the public, see Calhoun. For a concise summary of the history of
theories of checks and balances, see Hirschman.
[15] For detailed descriptions of the activities of Orange Alternative in Wrocklaw, see Kenney. For a
detailed discussion of the turtle people, see Thomas 1730.
[16] For an explorationof the political events surroundingthe collapse of the Soviet Union, see Bruner
and Morozov,especially chapters 1 and 10; and Wedel. Clearly,carnivalesque protests were not theonly factor involved in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and that is not my claim. In
Poland, for example,the work of Pope John Paul II and Solidarity were major contributing factors.
Nevertheless, as Kenney shows, those protests did play a very important role.
[17] World systems theory has been most fully explicated by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein.
[18] Some scholars go so far as to deny that language plays any representative role whatsoever,
although I prefer to see language as serving both representative and constitutive functions. For
arguments in defense of the former position, see Stewart.
[19] Villas thesis is that Socrates invented a form of dissident citizenship that can be traced to such
disparate thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt. This form
of citizenship does not seek to establish truth so much as critique presumed truths to expose
their incoherence.
[20] Derridas basic argument is that deconstruction seeks to reveal the limits of practices of
identification in order to make them available for reflective critique.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington. Indiana UP, 1984.
Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, and Class: Ambiguous Identities.
New York: Verso, 1991.
Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Random, 1995.
Bruner, M. Lane, and Viatcheslav Morozov, eds. Market Democracy in Post-Communist Russia.
Leeds, UK: Wisdom House, 2004.
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959.
Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992.
Carlson, A. Cheree. Ghandi and the Comic Frame: Ad Bellum Purificandum. Quarterly Journal of
Speech 72 (1986): 44655.
. Limitations on the Comic Frame: Some Witty American Women of the Nineteenth Century.Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 31022.
Clinton, William Jefferson. Address to the Council on Foreign Relations, 18 Sept. 1998. 22 July 2004
,http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807/emailspeech.html. .
. Address to the New York Historical Society, 17 Jul. 2001. 8 May 2005 ,http://
historynewsnetwork.org/articles/165.html. .
Crawford, Neta C. Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian
Intervention. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York:
Verso, 1998.
154 M. Lane Bruner
7/29/2019 Carnivalesque Protest
21/21
. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Deluca, Kevin Michael, and Jennifer Peeples. From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy,
Activism, and the Violence of Seattle. Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002):
12551.
Derrida, Jacques. Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Deconstruction and Pragmatism.
Ed. Chantal Mouffe. New York: Routledge, 1996. 7794.
Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981.
Florini, Ann M. ed. The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society. Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 10120.
.WhatisEnlightenment? TheFoucaultReader.Ed. PaulRabinow.NewYork:Pantheon,1984.32 50.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.
Goethe, J.W. Italian Journey. London: Penguin, 1970.Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1989.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997.
Jacobson, David L, ed. The English Libertarian Heritage. San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1994.
Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998.
Kenney, Padraic. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002.
Khagram, Sanjeev, James V. Rikker, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds. Restructuring World Politics:
Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics. New York: Verso, 1985.
Ladurie, Le Roy. Carnival in Romans. Trans. Mary Feeney. New York: George Braziller, 1979.
Laing, Gordon J. Survivals of Roman Religion. New York: Longmans, 1931.
Leach, Edmund. Rethinking Anthropology. London: Humanities P, 1961.
Maier, Pauline. Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America. Williamand Mary Quarterly27 (1970): 335.
Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America .
New York: Norton, 1988.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and
Language. Eds. SanderL. Gilman, CaroleBlair,and DavidJ. Parent. New York: OxfordUP, 1989.
246257.
Pockock, J. G. A. Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975.
Simons, Jon. Foucault and the Political. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Stallybrass,Peter, and AllonWhite. The Politics and Poeticsof Transgression. Ithaca,NY:Cornell UP, 1986.
Stewart, John. Language as Articulate Contact: Toward a Post-Semiotic Philosophy of Communication.
Albany: State U of New York P, 1995.
Stone, I. F. The Trial of Socrates. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Thomas, Janet. The Battle in Seattle: The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations. Golden,CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2000.
Villa, Dana. Socratic Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001.
Wedel, Janine. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe . New York:
Palgrave, 2001.
Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002.
Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 155