Time, Affect, Knowledge : The Embodied Institution of Social Protest Movements

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine the occurrence of protest and its temporal, affective, and epistemic dimensions from a phenomenological perspective, going beyond the widespread mind/body dualism and structuralist interpretations that underlie many treatments of social movement culture. In particular, we ask how exactly actors as well as researchers recognize joint protest and its associated common goals as such. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory aids us in developing a dual characterization of protest: as institution and, at the same time, as instituting force. Through the use of this dialectic, our contribution highlights how the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future orientations make it possible to model protest and its (inter-) situational historicity as a reiterative process. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s embodied dimensions of institutionality, we reveal how instances of protest offer the possibility of both transforming and perpetuating, and universalizing and particularizing the very institution of protest, for example through “the street” and/or social media.Employing an ethnographic example of decolonial protest in urban Senegal, we consider protest as an institution fully located in time. As institution, it draws on historical resources, such as the epistemology of resistance of former anti-colonial thinkers, which have been actualized and universalized. As instituting force, it directs its political concerns against, or in favor of, issues as a concrete presence which becomes particularized in the collective memory of the protesters. Furthermore, protest is perpetually oriented toward a presence that it attempts to transform and a vision of the future that it attempts to influence and ultimately achieve. This approach helps us to explain how social movements, which had grown out of former practices of decolonial resistance, have now stabilized and perpetuate themselves in today’s protests for decolonized futures.