I
An earlier blog entry suggested that perennial disappointment with revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion, today’s campus riots–to the effect that they have not culminated into “far-reaching institutional change” is probably very misleading.
The entire point of revolt may be revolts, in the plural. Revolts on their own give freer rein to imagine what could follow by way of a climax, be it utopia, dystopia, reform. Or to draw the same point from the negative direction: Our unrelieved stream of peak-crisis scenarios is itself proof that a prophesied climax can’t do all the talking.
II
I want to suggest that revolts do that talking in ways that many utopian narratives do not. Really-existing revolts, such as just those listed, have all manner of noise you don’t find utopians focusing on.
Revolts are very much in the present tense, one that in Amy Kornbluh’s words, “compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now. Moreover, present tense often forecloses conclusiveness, judgment, or resolution, lacking hindsight and favoring openness or even nonsensical, unplotted, impressionistic indeterminacy”. Revolts are their own version of illegible diary entries, allowing multiple interpretation. They are like those recordings of musicians whose grunts and movements are also part and parcel of the performance. Revolts are never comfortable, let alone satisfied, with one reading, performance or future.
Little if any of this surfaces by way of the utopian narrative. Which proves to be as frustrating and punishing as the inmate reading a prison library book only to find its pages have been torn out.
Sources
https://www.negationmag.com/articles/waxing-affect-anna-kornbluh
https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/10/24/the-entire-point-of-revolt-may-be-revolts-updated/
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 