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Text and Performance Quarterly

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Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State

M. 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 Quarterly, 25:2, 136-155 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930500122773

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Text and Performance Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 136155

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Carnivalesque Protest and the 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, Rabelais and 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 beneting 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 productive capacities 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.

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: joumib@langate.gsu.edu
ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) q 2005 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/10462930500122773

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What, after all, constitutes humor in a state? Guy Debord, in his discussion of the society of the spectacle, argues that the state never has 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 Maa 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 against the state, the general openness of government deliberations, the breadth and depth of political dialogue, and the degree to which state ofcials 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 ourishing forms of parodic and/or critical public entertainments, and are led by individuals encouraging critical citizenship. Conversely, sick and humorless states are populated 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 exemplied 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 only certain kinds of laughter in certain kinds of situations are the 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

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progressive forms of carnivalesque protest, critical democratic citizenship, and state health? By rst 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 selfinterested factions begin to undermine the common interest they simultaneously begin to stie 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 of carnivalesque 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 ofcially 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 inuence 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 state institutions 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 ofcially 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

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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 ofcial words and hierarchies; (2) the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions; (3) positive degradation and humiliation and an attitude of creative disrespect; and (4) a temporary retextualizing of social formations that exposes their ctive foundations (1 26).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 (13 14). Lending qualied 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 ofcials 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 ofcials assumed that those rules and norms would afterwards acquire even greater force. Ladurie is quick to add, 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 ofcials and state institutions and demand signicant 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 (311 12). 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 (313 16; italics in original). The carnivalesque also displays temporal features with political ramications. The three 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 ctive 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 ofcials) occur

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at the end of the carnival period to signify a return to the normal world of humorless repression where such politically consequential ctions 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 nds 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. Ofcial 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 but the 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 of serving 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 ctive

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and the real. Briey 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 nancial affairs (Rabelais 265 66). These poor devils also were allowed to take revenge on people in the community who had taken advantage of poor citizens, especially the corruptly rich and the selsh.11 Goethe, witnessing the carnival festival in Rome rsthand in January 1788, provides an account of carnival that captures a wide range of its traditional features, including the blending of the ctive and the real:
The Roman Carnival is not really a festival given for the people but one the people give themselves. The state makes very few preparations for it and contributes next to nothing. . . . All that happens is that, at a given signal, everyone has leave to be as mad and foolish as he likes, and almost everything, except sticuffs and stabbing, is permissible. The difference between social orders seems to be abolished for the time being; everyone accosts everyone else, all good naturedly accept whatever happens to them, 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 ghts 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 ctional eliding into the real, the reverse was also true during 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

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[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 ctional 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 conict 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 more than 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 esh 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 ction and fact and massacred the leaders of the poor peoples carnival, and after the ofcial 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 (218 28). 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 stie public critique to maintain their status. It also supports the early classical republican theory that subjects usually rebel only when there 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

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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 rst 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-rst century help to clarify the conditions in which such protests can succeed. Carnivalesque Protests and Their Windows of Opportunity rgen Habermas suggests that a critical (bourgeois) public emerged in various Just as Ju 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 that carnivalesque 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 specic 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 protest tactics 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

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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 openly serious 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 ctive 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 grafti. When the police would paint over Solidarity grafti, 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 little elves. At rst, 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 nd 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 ags 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 ne them, particularly because it was difcult 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, ofcials did not want to be seen as returning 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 grafti from seven years earlier. They handed out candy and sang childrens songs. Major Frydrych, who had the habit of comically dressing as a Soviet

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military ofcial, 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 ofcers, 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 identied 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 Major Fydrych 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 of socialist 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 briey opened and 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 ooded 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

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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 stiing 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 ghting for environmental justice and labor rights, some kind of clash was inevitable. Despite the slight and apparently temporary erosion of condence 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. Ofcials had already decided that massive public assemblies blocking the streets and delegate access to the WTO events would not be tolerated, 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 signicant violence on the part of police. Still, in the middle of this sea of political conict, 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 been initiated 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.

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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 rst told the group that if they encountered any kind of violence whatsoever they were to stop and surround it with peaceful turtle power. Second, he announced that if anyone did 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 ght back if provoked by police protecting their corporate 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 the turtles 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 (Thomas 8387). Even though 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 when taking over the intersection (Thomas 85). As opposed to the intersections where the turtles were, where people loved it, the cops loved it, bystanders loved it (Thomas 28), a tractor 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 and squirted pepper spray directly into their eyes . . . rubber bullets bruised the backs of retreating demonstrators [and] cans of tear gas were thrown (Thomas 8687). 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.

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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 ction-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 feel if he tuned in to see the big game and the entire coverage was focused on the guy selling peanuts? [T]he coverage was a veil that missed or minimized every substantive issue, diverting attention to the violence or threat of violence in the street. (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 time before 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 fortied 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 difcult time dealing with absurdity, symbolic protest, and the curious blending of the ctive 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

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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 difcult 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 difcult to dance or sing. The natural human reaction of those oppressed by what they consider to be unjust forces of order is to ght 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 specic kinds of humor and seriousness best reect the healthy state? Under what specic 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 oppressively humorless 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: the rst 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

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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 of communities 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 of law in defense of the common good, and a corrupt state is conceived as one that concerns itself with establishing the rule by law 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 the truly 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 ctions but absolutely necessary for human lifethus his notion of the art of living as the art of creating the best ctions 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 ctitious 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 ofcials, 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.

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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 denition 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 tournement (Society 144 46), Jacques Derrida has called deconstructive called de 20 justice, and what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have called radical democracy. 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 reduced laughter, for it is aware of being part of an uncompleted whole . . . it does not deny seriousness but puries and completes it. Laughter puries from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petried; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and 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 certainties that 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.

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Perhaps a nal example might help to summarize the difculties 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 political theorists 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 rst 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 world a 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 Benjamin iz ek have both pointed out in different ways, both corporate Barber and Slavoj Z 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 stied. 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.

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How we help to create conditions allowing citizens of the world to meet the challenges to statecraft in the twenty-rst century, especially the politically consequential ctions of national identity and sovereignty and the scourges of market fundamentalism and terrorism (and all the other certainties aficting 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 413 26. [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 134 37, 218 24. 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 308 9. Regarding carnival in the United States, Morgan persuasively argues that elections in early US history served a carnivalesque political function (196 208). [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 ofcially 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 ctional, but they take on the quality of the real because the ctions 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

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[13] [14]

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[15] [16]

[17] [18]

[19]

[20]

managed information ows and the centralized economies to their own benet and to the detriment of everyday people. Mock battles were also waged by Orange Alternative in Poland in the late 1980s (see Kenney 160 64). 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 beneciaries 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. For detailed descriptions of the activities of Orange Alternative in Wrocklaw, see Kenney. For a detailed discussion of the turtle people, see Thomas 17 30. For an exploration of the political events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, see Bruner and Morozov, especially chapters 1 and 10; and Wedel. Clearly, carnivalesque protests were not the only 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. World systems theory has been most fully explicated by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. 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. 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. Derridas basic argument is that deconstruction seeks to reveal the limits of practices of identication in order to make them available for reective critique.

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