Mechanical reproduction of la manif and the Tea Party

“Sarkozy: ça pue Vichy” (click to enlarge)

When the Awl complains that this has been a miserable American summer, they’re mostly right, but it hasn’t been exactly a great summer in France, either. Sarkozy has decided to kick off the 2012 presidential campaign extra early by re-burnishing his xenophobic credentials, angling to get the support of the far-right Front National types–the very people who abandoned him during the regional elections earlier this year. Most notably, Sarkozy has called for the deportation of Roma and other Travellers from France, even though, as EU citizens, the Roma have every right to be in France. Stoking xenophobic fears is a classic pétainiste move, as we saw in last year’s L’Armée du crime, which showed how the Résistance was demonized in Vichy France as being overrun with foreigners and communists (which it, of course, was, to its credit). I suppose the Sarkozy government was more willing to stir up a human rights fight than continue hearing the endless stream of bad news regarding the Woerth/Bettencourt affair, but the mistreatment of the Roma and the “Gens du voyage” prompted a massive protest on Saturday that led tens of thousands of protesters from the Place de la République to the Bastille and back to the infamous Hôtel de Ville, and it’s the ideas that the manif prompted that I want to address below.

I attended a few anti-Soviet (well, pro-Lithuanian independence) rallies in the late 1980s, including riding in a bus with a bunch of activists from Boston to Washington DC to protest the visit of Eduard Shevardnadze at the USSR embassy.¹ Part of the appeal of the protest was the night before, when the activists would all congregate somewhere and prepare their signs. We were an unfunded outfit, so our own manual labor had to produce the signs we would wave.²

On one trip to DC, however, I was there coinciding with a Teamsters rally against NAFTA, I think.³ The Mall was littered with discarded signs, almost all printed at some cost to someone! in two colors on white. I brought one back with me (to put up on my wall in my dorm, thereby enhancing my lefty cred at prep school), but seeing the mass produced signs really bothered me. There was something fake, I felt, about participating in a rally featuring such mechanical reproduction. I went to rallies, I felt, because I cared about the issues, and I cared about the issues enough to spend the time to invent a funny slogan / sign, draw it in (again, illegibly mannered) typography, and carry it with pride. A printed sign, even a union-printed sign, seemed like the refuge of a poseur, a readymade protest for the kind of person who just showed up at a rally without any serious commitment to the issues involved.

We are all Roma. (click to enlarge)

Fairly or not, this perspective reached for me its most absurd levels in 2000, when Hadassah Lieberman would appear somewhere and the crowd would wave all these identical blue signs reading “Hadassah!” I mean, no disrespect to the potential future Second Lady, but the signs showed a kind of enthusiasm over her that felt completely fake to me.⁴ Then, during Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver in 2008, if I recall correctly, the entire crowd on cue began waving “Help Is On the Way” signs as he began to use it as a theme in his speech. This is one example of many, but this sort of reproduction of the audience as a photoshopped mass waving the same signs over and over has become a kind of staple of US political expression at the national party level (I don’t know about other levels).

At the rally to support the rights of Roma and Travellers on Saturday, however, the mechanical reproduction of protest imagery was part of the point. First, the Fédération anarchiste scored a major coup with their black inverted triangle stickers that had the word “ROM” printed on them in a font that looked like Hebrew.⁵ In a Spartacus move, the stickers asserted the power of collective action over individual particularity. If the government plans on separating the Roma from the rest of the French population, then the rest of the French population will assert themselves as Roma, ruining the efforts of isolating a community. Considering the principle of égalité, if we can’t all be equal in being ethnically neutral, then we’ll all be equal by being marked as Roma. As one (hand-made) sign pithily put it, “NOUS SOMMES TOUS LES R HOMMES.”

Simply put, the stickers offered both an easy means of integrating oneself into the rally, but also a means of showing the quantitative support of the rights of the Roma. Showing up at République is already a certain political gesture after all, and the sticker is a marker that makes you stay. I mean, I doubt people were just walking around the Third yesterday, saw a bunch of activists, and decided to get involved.

“Non à la république du fric, des flics et des patrons !” (click to enlarge)

Furthermore, as is I imagine the norm for French manifestations, the quantitative strength (total numbers) is only part of the story. There’s probably some element of pee contesting between the various heavy hitters as far as making the biggest show. The Confédération Générale du Travail, for example, had (at least) two trucks, two balloons, lots of music, and tons and tons of stickers to give out. The newbie Nouveau parti anticapitaliste also had lots of stickers, a truck blasting anti-Sarkozy hip-hop, and widely reproduced posters calling for an end to the “République du fric, des flics et des patrons.” The larger parties, including the consolidated Front de gauche, made up of the PCF and other center-left parties, and the Parti socialiste made up the rearguard of the march, and they had what seemed to be the clearest image of reproduced signage. And they also seemed the least enthusiastic of any of the organizations marching. The representatives of the PS looked downright bored.

That boredom suggested a kind of tension in the rally, a tension between individual interest and collective interest. That is, I suspect a lot of people turned out largely because the group called on them to do so. I’m certain that everyone present honestly believes that Sarkozy is being a complete asshole with his actions toward the Roma, but that if the PS/PCF/whoever had not called on its members to come out to protest the position, they might not have. I saw this all over the place–the rally felt more like a big social occasion, a chance to catch up with friends after a long summer apart on vacation (C’est la rentrée, after all!). Sure, there was chanting, the CGT blasted the “Internationale” on its stereo system, and many sang along, but I do not suspect that anyone shouted themselves hoarse like I did at the May Day rally in Chicago in 2006. What I mean to suggest here is that the very act of rallying as a group means something more than just “caring about the issues.” The social, community element is extremely important too, which is why it’s no surprise that the friend I went with is an anthropologist who is studying precisely one of the groups that showed up. The rally is a chance to meet up with your fellow commies, say, and chit chat, and feel like part of a group that has both social and political value to you.

In this case, where the rally is made up of specific groups/parties made up of people who know each other, the mechanical reproducibility provides not just pissing contest “look at the show we put on” bragging rights, but also extends a kind of belonging. The “ROM” sticker was an outward political gesture of ironic protest to a republic that is not terribly interested in making certain people feel like they belong. The “la CGT” or “NPA” stickers, on the other hand, were precisely the opposite–they were ways of expressing specific membership in a group as a way of belonging to that group.⁶ If everyone showed up with their own hand-made signs, no one could be critiqued for not putting in the advance effort, but the rally would not be able to take advantage of feelings of belonging that predate the rally, that predate the issue, even.

This point is important when I try to bring what I pieced together about this rally with what I know about anti-war rallies in the US in the early part of this century and with what I read about Tea Party rallies, including the “Restore honorable gold trading” rally this past weekend in DC.

[This part of the post is not terribly well researched. Sorry.]

A complaint I often heard about those anti-war rallies hinged on the fact that they were organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. Critics of the rallies pointed out that A.N.S.W.E.R. was a radical fringe group and that there is no way on earth those tens upon tens of thousands of people would actually agree to most of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s actual political positions. As a result, the rallies were somehow… illegitimate. In response, I recall hearing people say that they did not care who it was who did the logistics.⁷ They, themselves, as individuals, felt the need to express their dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. I imagine they, too, felt like they needed to be around other people who felt like they did, regardless of other political or social connections, just to feel like they weren’t alone with their anti-war sentiments.⁸ But it kind of defuses the community, turning an anti-war march into some kind of shameful gathering of transgressors. Everyone arrives via a different route, stays a while to indulge in their transgressions, and then floats back off in separate directions. It’s the nonce community of something like a tearoom, maybe?

But this individualist/organic spirit that was used to discredit the anti-war movement is now, perversely, the seeming source of the Tea Party’s power. The Tea Party is To Be Reckoned With precisely because it is, despite what the lamestream media might say about either Sarah Palin or the Koch brothers, decentralized, individual, emergent like a rhizome, full of nodes firing along unpredictable channels. If the Tea Party were seen to be yet another in a long line of arboreal forms of protest, then it would be dismissable as just politics as usual. But no, its faux organicism is exactly what makes it stylish. They are the pre-destroyed jeans of our political wardrobe.⁹

What I mean here is that as long as the Tea Party can convince the media and the politicians and the public that they represent a sort of disorganized, uncertain, but palatable discontent within the US, those groups can ignore the Tea Party only at their risk. The American fetish of grassroots activism, which is why Obama was considered to be so transcendent, helps the public to dismiss forms of protest that are markedly coming “from above,” say, from a union, “demanding” that its members turn out to protest something or help someone get elected.¹⁰

So it’s funny to me to see the lengths to which the Palin machine goes to hide its continuity, acting instead as a reactive bouncy ball that rolls over to whichever “organization” wants to shell out the six figures to hear Sarah Palin speak. There should be no shame in declaring organizational affiliation even on the national level. It might just help those Tea Partiers feel like they belong to something, instead of just whining about how they want “America back.”

1. This was the high point of my ’60s glorification. I was interviewed by a newspaper and said I had wished I lived in that time period, so that I could be part of a protest movement. In retrospect, I find that sentiment absurd in the extreme, but the person having it was, like, 13, so chillax. [↩]
2. Mine were invariably too wordy and my typography was outrageously mannered, making my posters gibberish as far as political call to action is concerned. Others were content with just scrawling “Nyet, Nyet, Soviet!” on their signs. I had to be fancy. [↩]
3. This is probably the late-August trip I took to DC to see Georgetown in 1993, then. [↩]
4. This is most certainly a feeling related to my general sense of disappointment with Gore’s choice of a running mate. [↩]
5. The Roma actually wore brown triangles in German concentration camps. [↩]
6. After the “ROM” sticker, which I did not get, an “NPA” sticker was my second most coveted, since I’ve felt a bit of kinship with them based on my following their work over the past year. It also looks awesome. [↩]
7. I recall this being an often repeated response to the Nation of Islam and the Million Man March. The issues that the march brought up were more important than the positives or negatives of the organization setting up the march. [↩]
8. I wrote an article for the Maroon around that time about how I felt like I had become incomprehensible when it came to discussing the war. The anti-war position was so silent in the mass media, yet seemed so obviously the right course of action, that I felt like the only reason we were going to war was because the anti-war people were, simply, incoherent. We were incapable of making sense. Man, what an awful time that was. Is. [↩]
9. In Vilnius this summer I saw two young women walking together in identical destroyed jeans. It was jarring, to say the least. [↩]
10. This coercive power of unions, of course, is why they are the devil and why even 7% of a workforce’s being organized is 7% too much. [↩]

Tags: ANSWER, Barack Obama, belonging, collective action, community, Confédération générale du travail, Fédération anarchiste, France, Hadassah Lieberman, L'Armée du crime, mechanical reproduction, Nicolas Sarkozy, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Paris, Parti Socialiste, PCF, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Awl