Radical Interventions

Politics Improper:
Iris Marion Young, Hannah Arendt,
and the Power of Performativity
Jane Monica Drexler

This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context
of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting
Iris Marion Youngs approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendts theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene
in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of
proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action
as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance.

It is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of

realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable,
to be prepared for and to expect miracles in the
political realm. And the more heavily the scales
are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous
will the deed done in freedom appear.
Hannah Arendt, What Is Freedom?
In An Essay on Liberation, Herbert Marcuse identifies democracys absurd situation: The established democracy still provides the only legitimate framework
for change and must therefore be defended against all attempts on the Right
and the Center to restrict this framework, but at the same time, preservation
of the established democracy preserves the status quo and the containment of
Hypatia vol. 22, no. 4 (Fall 2007) by Jane Monica Drexler

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change (1969, 68). In the established democracy, dissent can be tolerated,

and even encouraged, but only as long as it adheres to established rules and
manners. In this relationship between radical opposition and institutionalized
democracy, the opposition is thus sucked into the very world which it opposes
(64). Marcuse explains a central dilemma: In radical political practice, the end
belongs to a world different from and contrary to the established universe of
discourse and behavior. But the means belong to the latter and are judged by the
latter, on its own terms, the very terms which the end invalidates ... thus [the
radical action] is judged by the very standards which the action indicts (73).
This is the root of democracys absurd situation. Within established democratic
processes, oppositional actionto be counted as proper, legitimate, political,
reasonable, even sensiblemust adhere to the rules of a game that is rigged in
favor of the maintenance of the very processes the action wishes to disrupt.
In this context, and from the perspective of feminist political practice
aimed at transforming oppressive social and political structures, how should
we think about oppositional, performative political practice? What is its value
for democracy? What insights can it give into the possibility of politics, and
the meaning of politics, under modern conditions of exclusion, corruption, and
bureaucratization in the realm of established political spheres?
My purpose here is to explore these questions. This essay is part of a larger
conversation Ive been having with radical democratic feminist political theory,
primarily the work of Iris Marion Young, about the viability of a Habermasian
communicative ethic as a conceptual tool adequate for understanding political action in the context of oppression; and further, about the usefulness of
political concepts drawn from the work of Hannah Arendt to ground a theory
of resistant politics.
As I explore the importance of oppositional political action, I begin with an
investigation of the insights and limitsof feminist political theories of inclusion
for identifying the value of such acts. Framing the first section primarily around
Youngs most recent book, Inclusion and Democracy, I explore the ways in which
Youngs conceptual framework of inclusion leads her to locate the importance
of oppositional performative political practices in their deliberative impulses.
As such, I argue that even as Young draws crucial insights about the nature
of oppositional practices from Arendts concepts of action and plurality, her
theorization of the value of such practices remains problematically tied to the
very (Habermasian) conceptual frameworks from which she intends to depart.
Youngs conceptual framework of inclusion ultimately implies a narrowing of the
idea of politics to communication and thus is unable adequately to account for
the importance of contestation for participatory democracy. Revisiting Arendts
theories of political action, I argue that the value of Arendts political theories
for understanding resistant politics lies in the extent to which she can offer an
alternative to the conceptual framework of inclusion.

Jane Monica Drexler

Inclusion and Democracy

In Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Young echoes Marcuses diagnosis in her critique of Jrgen Habermass normative theories of a properly functioning public
sphere. She argues specifically, with regard to styles of speech and speech presentation, that this model of deliberative democracy problematically privileges
argument and that it assumes an exclusionary norm of orderliness and articulateness. In such a model of deliberative democracy, argumentthe presentation
of a logical chain of reasons leading to a logical conclusionconstitutes the
legitimate form of discourse in the public sphere. Young, however, argues against
this privileging of argument as fundamentally exclusionary in nature. First, she
argues, privileging argument requires assuming shared premises and conceptual
frameworks. According to Young, The effort to shape arguments according to
shared premises within shared discursive frameworks sometimes excludes the
expression of some needs, interests, and suffering of injustice, because these
cannot be voiced with the operative premises and frameworks (37).
Young points to a second exclusionary factor of a focus on argumentation.
Privileging argument entails privileging particular norms of articulateness and
dispassionateness: norms of speaking that I bring under the label articulateness privilege the modes of expression more typical of highly educated people
... straightforward assertion ... formal and general speech ... expression that
proceeds from premises to conclusion in an orderly fashion ... these norms
of articulateness are culturally specific (38). As such, Young argues, they are
problematically exclusionary.
However, while she is clearly critical of Habermass and other deliberative
democratic theorists conceptualization of inclusion, openness, and accessibility of the public sphere, Young nevertheless maintains the position that
inclusive political communication is the key element of democratic practice.
As she explains, The normative legitimacy of a democratic decision depends
on the degree to which those affected by it have been included in the decisionmaking processes and have had the opportunity to influence the outcomes
(5). To this end, then, she argues throughout Inclusion and Democracy that a
democratic theory must explore additional and deeper conditions of political
inclusion and exclusion, such as those modes of communication attending to
social difference, representation, civic organizing, and the borders of political
jurisdictions (6).
One of Youngs primary contributions to political theory is her revaluation
of contestatory, performative political speech and action as crucial elements for
deep democracy. Her point of departure, starting all the way back in Toward
a Critical Theory of Justice, and Justice and the Politics of Difference, is a critique of a logic of identity, unity, and consensus that runs through deliberative
democratic theory. As Young explains, The irony of the logic of identity is

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that by seeking to reduce the differently similar to the same, it turns the merely
different into the absolute other. It inevitably generates dichotomy instead of
unity, because the move to bring particulars under a universal category creates
a distinction between inside and outside ... [in which] the outside ... the
chaotic, unformed, transforming ... always threatens to cross the border and
break up the unity of the good (1990, 99).
In Inclusion and Democracy, she continues her project of addressing the political necessity of retheorizing inclusion in such a way that it breaks down this
strict distinction between inside and outside. So, she places great emphasis on
the political importance of dissent and contestation. Young notes several times
that democratic practice is rife with what she calls deep disagreement: that
is, circumstances in which political agreement cannot, or will not, be reached,
but which are not reducible to a sort of (mere) cultural pluralism. As Young
explains, Many contemporary political theorists conceptualize the sources of
deep disagreement in cultural differences or differences in basic world-view and
value frameworks (2000, 118). She argues, however, that such attention to
cultural pluralism ... has diverted attention from a more common source of
disagreement: structural conflict of interest (118). Given this source of deep
disagreement, Young explains that even within an inclusive political sphere,
agreement will not be forthcoming, and at best, inclusive debate will (only)
reveal that these conflicts of interest ... can only be resolved by changing
structural relations (119).
Because of the reality of deep disagreement, Young argues that any model
which in its foundation excludes marginalized perspectiveseither through
excluding the methods of communication or its purposesserves the ideological
purpose of effacing the nature of political activity, and ultimately functions de
facto to delegitimize and render invisible any radical critique.
In order to explore the nature of deep disagreement and of political activity
as struggle, Young borrows Hannah Arendts concept of plurality to more fully
theorize oppositional political communication: For Arendt, the public is not
a comfortable place of conversation among those who share language, assumptions, and ways of looking at the issues. Arendt conceives the public as a place of
appearance where actors stand before others and are subject to mutual scrutiny
and judgment from a plurality of perspectives (111).
For Young, then, taking plurality and political struggle seriously requires a
revaluation of communication across different locations and social positions.
To this end, Young argues that several alternate forms of communication ought
to be included in a political model concerned with deepening democratic practice. She focuses primarily on three types of communication, which have been
wrongly excluded from political arenas: greeting, storytelling, and rhetoric.
Under the rubric of rhetoric, Young includes several styles of oppositional
political practice, including street demonstrations and other such protests,

Jane Monica Drexler

and, in general, rowdy, disorderly, and emotional speech and action. Under
conditions of oppression and deep structural political exclusion, one important
function of rhetorical speech and action is to expand the issues, perspectives,
and needs upon which a given political arena can deliberate: Rhetorical moves
often help to get an issue on the agenda for deliberation. Demonstration and
protest, the use of emotionally charged language and symbols, publicly ridiculing or mocking exclusive or dismissive behavior of others are sometimes
appropriate and effective ways of getting the attention for issues of legitimate
public concern (67).
In attempting to underpin the relationship between rhetorical strategies
and deliberative democracy, Young argues that these oppositional styles are
valuable to the extent that they adhere to a certain level of reasonableness.
It is important to note here that Youngs introduction of this term reasonableness is counter to the traditional conception of the reasonable, which evokes
norms of dispassionateness, civility, and articulateness. Her use of this term
is meant to refer to the impulses within rhetorical action and speech, toward
communication, understanding, inclusion, and openness (45). As she states,
In democratic struggle citizens engage with others in the attempt to win
their hearts and minds, that is, their assent. To do so, they should be open
and reasonable, and be prepared to challenge others through criticism and not
merely the assertion of opposition (51). She explains that in considering the
reasonableness of protest, the presumption should be in favor of the protestors
that their purpose is to persuade (48).
Now, to be sure, what is crucial about Youngs work here is that, among other
things, she shifts the focus of politics proper away from a strict distinction
between formal sites of deliberation, on the one hand, and sites like the street
where political speech and action are often deemed manipulative and strategic,
on the other. In its stead, she revalues alternate styles and sites of political activity, arguing that the lines between rational and strategic are problematically set
and in effect ensure against deep democratic practice.
However, it is at this point that Youngs focus on inclusion begins to reveal
some problematic implications, and limits the extent to which we can explore
the importance of contestation. Locating the value of contestatory practice in
its persuasive impetuses ultimately reinscribes the very boundaries of politics
proper that she intends to reject. As she locates the value of such acts through
the conceptual lens of inclusion, she argues that underlying their apparent
rowdiness, disruption, and disorder is communicative intent. However, as I
have argued elsewhere, In this way, she makes a significant implication about
the nature of rhetoric: that its ultimate impetus is illocutionarymeaning
that its purpose and design is to produce understanding. It is oriented towards
reaching persuasion and agreement; even though it may be an untraditional
mode of rational communication, its rational impetus remains, and even though

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it may be seen as disorderly or disruptive, it is nevertheless reasonable and

appropriate because it opens up public space for deeper inclusion of peoples
and perspectives (Drexler and Hames-Garcia, 2004, 57).
The issue here becomes how contestatory practice is conceived and valued.
For Young, its value for democracy rests on its ability to gain inclusion for
excluded perspectives into a deliberative arena, in which these perspectives can
be recognized and legitimated through illocutionary, rational communication. It
is clear from the above examination of how she treats the issues of rhetoric and
protest that Young ultimately retains the conceptual framework of Habermasian
communicative ethics, even while she is specifically critical of how he himself
worked with his terms of debate. Habermas rejected rhetorical practices such
as street demonstrations precisely because he deemed them manipulative, nonrational, and oriented toward pressure and coercion. And Young is specifically
critical of Habermass exclusion of such acts from the bounds of politics proper.
Nevertheless, the ways in which she reclaims these acts as valuable ultimately
retains Habermass distinction between rational and strategic: she appears to
accept that distinction implicitly by rereading such acts as rational, as oriented
toward agreementin other words, as action that can be subsumed under the
category of rational illocution.
To some degree, then, understanding oppositional performative political
practice through the lens of inclusion may require implicit acceptance of
Habermass boundaries of politics proper. However, this becomes problematic
when trying to understand the importance of resistant politics for participatory
democracy in the context of oppression. I argue that the framework of inclusion is ultimately inadequate for garnering a rich understanding of what such
practices can tell us about the nature of participatory democracy. Furthermore, I
argue that the turn to Arendts notion of plurality in order to fortify and correct
the weaknesses in Habermass deliberative model, in effect, limits too much
of what Arendt herself sees as valuable in contestatory, oppositional acts. For
Arendt, it was precisely the disruption, the disorderly, in which the connection
between contestation and participatory democracy is located.
What Arendts theories suggest is that it is not primarily that contestatory,
performative acts enable inclusion or recognitionalthough they may in fact
do so. What makes these acts crucial for deep democracy is that within their
boundlessness, spontaneity, and resistibility lie the very possibilities of political freedom. What I mean to argue, then, in the remainder of this essay is that
counter to how Young understands contestation and performativity, Arendts
theories of action and plurality allow for a revaluation of the political importance of the unreasonableor, in other words, the political importance of
those elements of political action that cannot be subsumed under a concept of
the communicative, deliberative, or illocutionary.

Jane Monica Drexler

Politics Improper
To explore the insights into the value of oppositional performative political
practice when seen through an Arendtian lens rather than through a focus on
inclusion, I begin with two examples: one during the 1999 WTO protests and
one in a toy store.
Seattle 1999
After the first day of protests at the 1999 WTO conference, in which tens of
thousands of demonstrators caused numerous disruptions, the mayor of Seattle
proclaimed a state of emergency and disallowed further demonstrating. Early
the next morning, hundreds of protestors gathered anyway, and started marching toward the conference site. Once they got there, about two hundred were
immediately arrested. Loaded onto a bus, the first group of about seventy-five
were handcuffed and driven to a police processing station. At the station, they
refused to assist in their processing. They refused to leave the central room, to
give any of their information, and (as they were all handcuffedtheir arms in
front of their bodies), they wrapped their handcuffed arms around each other,
made a chain and lay down in the room. They were ultimately there for about
fifteen hours, refusing to be processed, until the cops cut through the plastic
handcuffs and dragged them away. Another busload of arrested protestors started
jumping up and down on their bus in unison, until they were pepper-sprayed.
The day before that, thousands of protestors lay down in the city streets and
on highway exit ramps.
Seattle 2001
A group of women reclaiming the name WITCH (Womens International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) walked into FAO Schwartz.1 There, they
participated in a campaign of civil disobedience in which they affixed stickers
saying, This is offensive to women and girls, onto various magazines, posters,
Barbie dolls, easy-bake ovens, and the like. They moved in, affixed the stickers,
and slipped out undetected.
As I kept thinking about these examples, it occurred to me that there was
something quite significant for understanding democratic practice going on
in them, but it could not be fully articulated through a political theory based
upon inclusion. Claiming that these events carried within them communicative impulses aimed at gaining inclusion to a deliberative arena, or as having
similar characteristics, did not seem to cover enough of what was critically
important about these acts.

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Indeed, when seen strictly in terms of an inclusionary model, the WTO

protestors were interpreted as relatively ineffective or even destructive to
their cause. To the extent that theorists and spectators interpreted the events
through the lens of inclusion, they often had the following kind of response: I
agree with their struggle against the World Trade Organization, but they were
ensuring their own alienation by annoying or angering drivers who might have
been inclined to listen to them otherwise. In the case of those who refused to
be processed, while many folks appreciated its disruptiveness, it was difficult
for them to see how those acts could move the game forward toward gaining
inclusion. Ultimately, while those acts might seem interesting and exciting,
they werent really to be considered as part of the protest; that is, as part of the
political action of the demonstrations.
Similarly, when I talk about the women of WITCH in my classes, typical
responses run along the lines of: They are not convincing anyone of anything, in fact they are probably alienating more people than not, because their
approach is so invasive. They anger and distance themselves from the very
shoppers to whom they want to communicate. In other words, theyre not
properly political, theyre vandals.
Yet it seems to me mistaken to discard these acts as not political, or as not
adding anything to an understanding of democratic political action. But it
would also be mistaken to search within these acts for their communicative
element in order to identify their political value. Their political value lies
elsewhere.
As I look into the political promise of these acts, I want to draw attention
to several features of political action that are revealed when looking at these
acts through an Arendtian lens: namely, that oppositional performative action
prizes action over behavior, disrupts or arrests a systems inertia, and creates
and sustains spontaneity.
Prizing Action over Behavior
One of Arendts primary concerns centered on protecting political freedom
from the totalitarian impulses in modern society. What interested her was the
capacity of action for dispersion and creation. Against a numbing behaviorism,
Arendt valued the sheer act of doing.
For Arendt, political action was fundamentally characterized by its boundlessness. Action in this sense is uncontrollable, uncontainable, and dispersive.
Actions and reactions are always new actions sent out into the web of human
relationships through which they are filtered, challenged, and encountered
by different actions and reactions of other actors. In this sense, action has an
inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries
(1958, 190). In short, action has no end, nor a single trajectory: The smallest

Jane Monica Drexler

act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every
constellation (190).
Because of this boundlessness, it is also unpredictablewe can never foretell
with certainty the outcome and end of any action (223). Arendt conceived
action here as an unending process with multiple dispersions of intentions and
consequences. For Arendt, the boundlessness and unpredictability of political
action were precisely what set it apart from the necrophilic normalizations in
the ordinary seas of conformism. Its boundlessness and unpredictability are
what makes action extraordinary and ties it to an invigorated politics.
In Between Past and Future, Arendt argued that to be free and to act are the
same (1961, 153). She used the concept of virtuosity to explain: Freedom as
inherent in action is perhaps best illustrated by Machiavellis concept of virtu.
Its meaning is best rendered by virtuosity, that is, an excellence we attribute
to the performing arts ... where the accomplishment lies in the performance
itself and not in an end product (153). Arendt promoted the value of action
over behavior in response to the power of social practices and their tendencies
to normalizeto make people behave. In fact, Arendts model of action goes so
far as to critique the very roots of what we tend to consider to be actionwhat
is called the the moral interpretation of actiona model that understands
action as sovereign agency proceeding from general principles. In her Lectures on
Kants Political Philosophy, Arendt argued that a conception of action that posits
autonomous intentioning according to principles ultimately means that we are
following rulesin other words, we are behaving: practical reason reasons and
tells me what to do and what not to do; it lays down the law and it is identical
with the will, and the will utters commands; it speaks in imperatives (1970,
15). Dana Villa has summarized Arendts critique of the moral interpretation
of action: Through reflection, the vocabulary of justification, and shame, the
forces of the active type are rendered inactive ... action is brought down to
size through constant monitoring of its motives and consequences. The moral
interpretation of action, then, reveals a hostility toward individualizing or great
action in its very structure ... insuring that motives and consequences take
precedence over the performance of action as such (1992, 284).
Mara Lugoness general critique of the modern concept of agency bears
directly on my own understanding of the importance of Arendts critique of the
moral interpretation of action and its limits for understanding oppositional performative political action. In Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker Theorist,
Lugones explains the central logic of the concept of agency: Late modernity
gave rise to the fiction of effective individual agency ... [but] this fiction hides
the institutional setting and the institutional backing of individual potency
(2003, 211). According to Lugones, In this conception of agency, the successful agent reasons practically in a world of meaning and within social, political

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and economic institutions that back him up and form the framework for his
forming intentions that are not subservient to the plans of others and that he is
able to carry into action unimpeded and as intended (211). Under the modern
conception of agency, unless we have inclusion in a dominant world of sense, we
have no agency, no self-determination. Without a conceptual alternative to the
late modern notion of agency, resistant negotiations of meaning are reduced to
haphazard, happenstance, disjointed intrusions on dominant sensea troubled
sort of passivity (215).
The modern conception of agency limits the extent to which one can conceptualize resistant practice in general. Within its conceptual framework, we
either act on our intentions with efficacy or we are merely disruptiveineffective tantrums of desperation that can have no real impact on politics itself,
unless we try to fit our actions into an already established moral framework, and
make use of that framework through a type of shaming to get others to behave,
or unless we can use our oppositional practices as means to achieve real agency
through inclusion in a dominant sphere and thus receive the institutional
backing necessary to consider our acts autonomous, self-determining.
But what Lugones suggests as an alternative to agency is active subjectivity, which recognizes oppressed people as actors who resist oppressive social
worlds and who seek to develop and nurture counter-socialities in which their
resistance can be recognized and supported by those who are able to interpret
their actions outside the dominant worlds of sense. Lugoness conception of
active subjectivity departs from a sense of action as sovereign intentionality
and effectiveness. It enables a conception of active resistance by people whose
actions are not always or even primarily oriented toward gaining recognition
and backing from the dominant world of sense.
I think Lugoness critique of sovereign agency sheds light on Arendts notion
of action as boundless and uncontainable, and is ultimately required for understanding the nature and value of oppositional practice proceeding from outside
of a dominant world of sense. Indeed, in the dark times of modernity, with
its totalitarian tendencies, action-as-resistance becomes Arendts exemplar of
politics. In speaking of the French Resistance to the Nazis, Arendt explained
the fundamental connection between resistant groups and political action:
Without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm
wherewithout the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden
from the eyes of friend and foe . . . they had been visited for
the first time in their lives by an apparition of freedom ... they
had become challengers, had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without even knowing or even noticing it,
had begun to create that public space between themselves where
freedom could appear. (1968, 34)

Jane Monica Drexler

11

Looking at oppositional performative action as active subjectivity through

the Arendtian framework of actions boundlessness, unpredictability, as well
as Arendts valuation of action over behavior, then, seems to allow us to
understand the power of action beyond inclusion and persuasion. For instance,
oppositional performative action disrupts or arrests a systems inertia.
Action Disrupting or Arresting a Systems Inertia
When Iris Marion Young focuses on the functions of performative oppositional
practices as disruption and intervention, she hits on something important.
Oftentimes, one of the main dilemmas to effective political action is the sheer
plodding of a problematic system in which inertia seems to paralyze action:
The forces of power, the responsible parties, cannot be located. Everyones
hands are tied. ... The operations of the system plod along, day by day, in the
same grooves (2000, 174). In these circumstances, the promise of oppositional,
performative action is that it can sometimes arrest a systems inertia.
Young identifies the capacity of strategies for arresting inertia as occurring
through performative manifestation of a moral argument: Sometimes the force
of moral appeals made by otherwise powerless people effects a change of policy
because the powerful agents have been successfully shamed (175). Referring
to this strategy as the politics of shame, Young finds that it is often effective
for slowing, arresting, or altering a systems imperatives (176).
By contrast, Arendts focus on action allows me to articulate the political value of oppositional acts as lying, not in their ability to morally pressure
against system imperativesin other words, not as a mode of shaming people
into behaving according to moral principlesbut more importantly as lying
in their capacity to physically stop or slow a given process.
In speaking about such automatic processes, which, particularly under
modern conditions, often appear uninterruptable, Arendt draws our attention to
the concept of the miraculous, borrowing from New Testament passages where
miracles concern human acts, where miracles are always interruptions of
some ... series of events, of some automatic process (1961, 168). According to
Arendt, Every act, seen from the perspective of the process whose automatism
it interrupts, is a miraclethat is, something which could not be expected ...
It is the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an
infinite improbability, and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which
actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real (169).
Arendts focus on the ability of an act to interrupt a process is less concerned
with a moralor rationalpersuasion of a sovereign agent as it is concerned
with the sheer ability of acting qua acting to intervene in a process, and to
initiate new beginnings. As Villa explains,

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The combination of the modern world alienation with the late

modern escalation of the automatism present in life itself renders
the appearance of ... islands of freedom a ... miraculous event.
. . . It is not a question, therefore of pretending that we can
resurrect the agora or some approximation thereof by appealing
to deliberation, intersubjectivity, or acting in concert. What
matters is our ability to resist the demand for functionalizing
behavior and to preserve, as far as possible, our capacity for
initiatory agonistic action. (1997, 200)
For the arrested protestors in Seattle, their purpose in jumping up and down
on the bus was to stop its ability to move forward without incurring damage to
its underbelly. Their purpose in lying in a chain and refusing to be processed by
the police was to slow the pace at which the police were able to functionto
hinder the process of arresting people. In other words, they were slowing or
stopping a given process already moving in an unacceptable direction, and
thus opening up space for initiatory action in a manner that was only possible
through jarring a process out of the gears of routine.
Disruption of process or routine follows from, and is followed by, disruption of the reasonable and accepted. Consider the actions of the women from
WITCH. A person shopping for toys sees a sticker on a Barbie doll box boldly
proclaiming, This is offensive to women and girls. From a politics of shame
perspective, this tactic is successful to the extent that the person is shamed into
putting the box back down. I dont want to deny that this is often an effective strategy. But what is missing when you see the act only in terms of a type
of moral suasion, or as an attempt to include an alternate perspective, is that
momentthat infinitesimal and infinite moment when the person had to stop.
Stop her routine; interrupt her expectations; figure out what comes next. What
has been created here is what I call a spontaneous event.
Action Creating and Sustaining Spontaneity
To articulate what I mean by a spontaneous event, I want to draw attention
to how those who are involved are acting without markers of certainty; or, in
other words, they are acting with no script to which they can refer to guide
their action. The oppositional performative action moves the event beyond
the bounds of the proper, and as such, those who react or act in response to the
actor, are acting outside the boundaries of the accepted, outside the markers of
certainty. As people act against the demand for behavior, it is always surprising
and always beyond the bounds of a given systems expectations. In that sense,
it is always improper.

Jane Monica Drexler

13

The phrase markers of certainty refers to Claude Leforts claim that what
characterizes modern democracy is the disappearance of markers of certainty
(1988). With the development of democracy, the absolute foundation for the
power of political practice disappears as the authority of the monarchy, or God,
is replaced by the authority of the people. Rosalyn Deutsche explains it well:
Democracy, then, has a difficulty at its core. Power stems from the people ...
but democratic power cannot appeal for its authority to a meaning immanent
in the social. Instead, the democratic invention invents something else: The
public sphere (1996, 272). What the public ultimately exposes is the absence
of foundation, where the meaning and unity of the social is negotiatedat
once constituted and put at risk (272).
So, when I am speaking above about the significance for deep democracy of
those aspects of the improper in oppositional, performative acts, I am interested in their capacity for bringing to the surface the nature of democracy as
uncertain, contingent, and precarious. I am interested in holding on to those
moments forced outside constructed markers of certainty, drawing attention to
the possibilities that arise in that fleeting moment of uncertainty, when the act
is dispersed and reaction becomes an action in itselfan act of (re)constructing
a marker of certainty.
By moving beyond the markers of certainty that would accompany the
proper act, oppositional performative action creates spontaneous events
that shift the boundary of the possible. In some ways, this statement might
appear to be aligned with Youngs point about oppositional political practice.
Young argues that such acts expand deliberative spacethrough such acts,
excluded groups or perspectives can gain attention and recognition within a
discursive arena, new issues can be put on the agenda, and so forth. In that
way, such acts expand the realm of political deliberation. And I dont mean to
deny the importance of that. However, by seeing these acts through the lens
of an Arendtian conception of action, it becomes clear that their importance
lies, at least in large part, in the acts themselves and their capacity to enact
freedom. The political importance of these acts is that they reveal that what
motivates people when they do the improper is to do or to be more than they
were beforeto resist futility, to refuse functionalizing behavior, and to
initiate change. When people are asked why they protest, they certainly often
speak of wanting to communicate their perspective, wanting to be included,
and wanting to pressure. But just as much, if not more so, they want to act.
They want to take a stand, they want to interrupt their everyday routine and
play a part in the creation and re-creation of their world.
Looking at the importance of these oppositional, performative acts as prizing
action over behavior, as expanding the realm of the possible by functioning
beyond markers of certainty, also seems to offer me a better understanding, then,
of what Arendt might mean by the virtue of the great actor being courage.

14

Hypatia

The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an

indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in
a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert oneself into the
world and begin a story of ones own. And this courage is not
necessarily or even primarily related to a willingness to suffer the
consequences, courage and even boldness are already present in
leaving ones private hiding place and showing who one is, in
disclosing and exposing ones self. The extent of this original
courage, within which action and speech, and therefore . . .
freedom, would not be possible at all, is not less great and may
even be greater if the hero happens to be a coward. (1958,
18687)
In the context of resistant political appearance, courage means the capacity
to act beyond markers or scripts, to set something new and unanticipatable into
motion, and to refuse the conformity of social behavior in order to act anew.
And so, by drawing attention to the importance for deep democracy of the
boundlessness, spontaneity, and unpredictability of oppositional, performative
political acts, I do not mean to suggest that inclusion, recognition, and deliberation are not important elements for democratic processes. I mean simply to argue
that theorizing such practices through the lens of inclusion cannot adequately
articulate the importance of these acts for democratic freedom. This argument
does not imply a rejection of such concepts as inclusion, but it does suggest that
theories of democracy must go beyond these concepts to explore more deeply
the nature and importance of contestatory practice. This argument also does
not require a rejection of political activism aimed toward entry and recognition
within dominant public spheres, but it does ask us to revalue and re-envision
political action that performs freedom rather than asks for it.

Note
1. The original radical feminist group known as WITCH appeared in New York
City on Halloween 1968, when the guerrilla theater and action group first met to cast
a hex on Wall Street. Feminists in other cities formed similar groups and continued
working against those institutions they opposed, most notably the U.S. capitalist system
and federal government (Freeman 1971, 149).

Jane Monica Drexler

15

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