Workers of the World, Enjoy!: Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice Movement

2. Social Movements and Aesthetic Politics

❖ A esthetic imagery and practices are now widespread in social movements. In first-world societies, aesthetic themes became commonplace among many of the new social movements, such as gay and lesbian movements in the 1970s and 1980s. These movements are as much about imaginatively reconstructing identities displayed through style and speech as about developing rational programs to implement their political and economic demands. They appear to have more in common with the peasant tradition of carnival, with its revelry of festivals and pilgrimages, than with the ordered demonstrations of reformist politics.1 Yet even before the rise of the new social movements, many labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had an important aesthetic dimension to them, as did fascist movements such as Nazism. Most scholars of social movements have ignored this aesthetic dimension, concentrating instead on resources, strategies, and political opportunities in their analysis of social movements. The resource mobilization perspective focuses on conflicts over the distribution of social and political power and the mobilization of resources, while political opportunity theorists look to government weakness, such as conflicts among elites within the state, to understand how social movements can take advantage of these tensions to implement Social Movements and Aesthetic Politics 2 44 ▪ Chapter 2 their own agendas. Many sociologists are dissatisfied with this instrumental approach. They have responded to this materialist perspective by integrating an appreciation of the role of cultural experience and imaginative forms of solidarity and subjectivity in the dynamics of social movements. In this chapter, I begin with an analysis of the cultural turn in the study of social movements. This attention to culture has often underplayed the important aesthetic moment in social movements, though some researchers have been more sensitive to this aesthetic dimension than others. I examine the perspectives of Eyerman, Andrew Jamison, and Alexander, who see social movements as arenas for the generation of new aesthetic and moral meanings that can influence not only political strategies but also the meanings that define solidarity in civil society . I then move on to the approaches of Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine, who, like many postmodern theorists, take aesthetic issues seriously. They view social movements as expressions of new forms of subjectivity and transgression (what Touraine, borrowing from Foucault , labels subjectivation) that no longer depend on a weakened or nonexistent civil society. I then explore the postmodern perspectives of Laclau and Hardt and Negri, who posit a transgressive role for social movements, as they understand contemporary movements as agents of rupture with the existing society. Sociologists have not confronted these postmodern analyses, so I spend a bit more space on summarizing their ideas and placing them in a larger theoretical context. I end with a brief discussion of my approach to aesthetic politics and social movements that draws on yet moves beyond these perspectives. Culture and Social Movements Many social movement scholars are turning away from an emphasis on resources and opportunity costs to take into account the ways that collective identity and culture influence movements. Focusing on culture and collective identities allows the understanding of the processes by which identities emerge, rather than just viewing them as reflections of a group’s social position and economic and/or political interests. Such issues have come to the fore with the rise of new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which were focused as much on changing the culture of society as on improving the material conditions of their Social Movements and Aesthetic Politics ▪ 45 participants. For many sociologists, culture is understood in terms of “framing,” for it provides the interpretive schema by which movements make sense of social processes and social changes. Several scholars, including Doug McAdam and Aldon Morris in their respective analyses of the civil rights movement, see preexisting collective identities as central to the actions of social movements. Institutions like the African American church, with its organizational capacity and language of historical oppression and redemption, provided both the resources and the cultural frames that informed the civil rights movement.2 Other scholars such as Charles Kurzman argue that culture should be even more squarely at the center of social movement analysis. As he states, meaning making is “a goal in itself, a spur to action, and a site of contestation.”3 This attention to culture reinforces the notion that collective identities are socially constructed. These transformed identities allow new meanings and ideas about self and society...