Blogpost #2
I feel that the movements in this unit speak to the tenuousness of the border between these two concepts. In his article “Political Games of Chance: Monstrations and Their Ludic Tactics,” Daniil Leiderman gestures to this instability, aptly noting that some scholarship situates recreative protest in a “framework of liminality […] existing between legality and illegality, legibility and illegibility, political critique and apolitical play” (149). I was intrigued by the tension inherent to this liminality, in the sense that it can be, and often is, both protective of artists and counterproductive to their protest. The more formally proximal performance protest is to its object, the more difficult it becomes for its artists to ensure that their mimetic reproduction reads as critical, or at least not venerating, to the interpretative communities towards which it is oriented and presented.
The dilemma this understandably presents is particularly relevant to subversive affirmation and its most mature stage, over-identification. To a greater extent than Monstration, whose riffs on traditional protest aesthetics are often more recognisably humorous and therefore also more discordant, subversive affirmation and over-identification —as argue Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse in “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance”—can only be effective if “there is simultaneously taking place a distancing from, or revelation of what is being affirmed,” produced by “surplus which destabilises affirmation and turns it into its opposite” (445). The tension I note above is obvious here: If the protest’s attempt to distance from is imperceptible to its audience it does to an extent shield its performer from the engineers of that which it criticises; but if it fails to destabilise affirmation it can instead serve to reinforce it, defeating its purpose and indeed promoting further the aesthetic it seeks to ironically mimic.
Of course, this is not always the case; naturally, the extent to which rhetoric is extreme and its aesthetic is romantic plays a large role in determining how legible over-identification can be. Arns and Sasse suggest that over-identification’s removal of messaging from its original aesthetic context, “making explicit the implications of an ideology and thus [producing] such elements that may not be publicly formulated” (448), can force adherents to directly confront the tangible ends a movement aims to achieve, and therefore also their complicity in bringing them about. The Serbian case they highlight exemplifies perfectly how effective over-identification is when it draws and pulls back the curtain in near-equal measure. All that being said, undressing an ideology can also be extremely dangerous; no matter how repulsive the protester may feel it is when on full display, it is entirely possible that exposure to its extreme pillars would only further radicalise its subscribers.
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