J ctvb1hrcf 14 PDF

University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: CONCLUSION: THE CULTURAL STUDY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Book Title: The Art of Protest

Book Subtitle: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present
Book Author(s): T. V. REED
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (2019)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctvb1hrcf.14
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CONCLUSION
THE CULTURAL STUDY OF
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
The stories I have told about the ten major social movements that
make up the core of this book are based in general assumptions about
how movements work—how they arise, how they develop, and how they
shape the wider society. I have made some of these assumptions explicit
in the individual case studies, but for the most part I have addressed
them only implicitly. So, in this concluding essay I will try to offer a
more general picture of how movements work by looking at the large
body of social movement theory that has developed over several decades.
The dynamics of movements should be of interest not only to scholars
but to activists (including scholar-activists) as well, who hopefully can
use this knowledge to make their movements more effective.
First, I will briefly sketch and comment on some of the major
schools of movement theory that have shaped movement studies and
my own analyses. Then I will suggest some of the ways I think these
various approaches can to a certain extent be synthesized. But this over-
view is decidedly not meant as a total theory of how movements work.
In my view, there are too many different kinds of movements and dif
fering paths of development to fit into one overarching framework. My
comments will be most relevant to the particular set of movements cov-
ered in this book. The great variety of movements argues against viewing
them through a single lens, no matter how complexly crafted. In any
claim to name the essential features of all movements there is a danger
371
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372 Conclusion
not only of reductively shoehorning differing types of movements into

one paradigm but also of inadvertently missing the ongoing creativity
of movements, missing their ability to shape-shift in response to new
conditions.
SCHOOLS OF MOVEMENT ANALYSIS

What we now call social movements have existed throughout human
history. Some historians argue that a modern form of movement emerged
only in the era of industrialization, but others see continuities going back
centuries into things like peasant revolts. While thinking about move-
ments has therefore no doubt a much longer history, the academic study
of movements arose primarily in the twentieth century.1 The approach
known as collective behaviorist is generally cited as the first major school
of movement thinking to emerge from modern social science. Collective
behaviorist scholars linked movements to such things as riots, crowds,
and mass hysteria. Shaped in part by the recent memory of the fascist
movements in Germany, Italy, and Japan, and by the conformist mood of
the 1950s, when this school arose to prominence, this approach stressed
the irrational dimensions of movements and often saw them as poten-
tially dangerous, temporary aberrations in the otherwise smooth-flowing
social system. While parallels between movements and other forms of
collective behavior can be illuminating and are still studied, the generally
dark, irrationalist view of movements originally stressed by this school
of thought has been superseded by more complex and varied approaches
that recognize the rational nature and positive contributions of many
movements.
The next major approach to emerge was the resource mobilization
school. This branch of movement analysis developed from the 1960s
onward, partly in response to a more positive view of movements in that
major era of protest. This school stressed the ways in which movements
are shaped by and work within limits set by the resources (especially
economic, political, and organizational resources) available to a group
and the organizational skills of movement leaders in utilizing those re-
sources. It was also primarily interested in direct, measurable impacts of
movements on political issues. This meant that resource mobilization
scholars were less interested in what they saw as the identity-shaping
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Conclusion 373
and consciousness-related dimensions of movements, which they often

characterized as vaguely “expressive” (expressive is a word often used dis
missively to suggest that particular elements of culture are merely decora
tive add-ons, not substantial factors). A related third school, the political
process camp, incorporated much of the resource mobilization approach
into one that emphasized the waxing and waning of political opportu-
nities as key to movement success or failure. A political process approach,
for example, might stress the role of the Supreme Court’s Brown v.
Board of Education decision in opening up political possibilities for a
new movement, and would view the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and
1965 as the key evidence of the relative success of the movement.
Resource mobilization and political process models remain very
influential in the body of scholarship on movements, and with good
reason. In each of the preceding chapters I have tried to acknowledge
the structural factors emphasized by these approaches. But these schools
were increasingly criticized, beginning in the 1980s, for relying too ex-
clusively on structural political and economic forces—that is, for failing
to address how the resources and political opportunity structures on
which they focus were actually translated into action. They sometimes
acted as if these forces shaped movements automatically, apart from actual
human intervention. Critics argued that these approaches neglected the
processes by which activists become aware of and act upon political
opportunities, and the processes by which people are persuaded to
gather up and put to work the various resources needed to develop and
sustain a movement.
The first important school of analysis to seriously address some of
these cultural dimensions is known as frame alignment theory. Emerging
in the mid-1980s from a branch of sociology interested in the ways in
which individuals interact to create their basic values and worldviews,
this approach examines the ways in which movements draw upon and
seek to shift the mental frameworks through which people decide what
is morally right and socially justifiable. Movements need to evoke exist-
ing cultural values and then persuasively connect those values to the
grievances held by the people seeking change. Think of the way in which
the Civil Rights movement claimed to be expanding the value of human
equality announced in the nation’s founding documents, such as the
Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Movements
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374 Conclusion
seek to realign existing cultural frames so as to create a picture of their

movement attractive enough to recruit members and draw support from
the wider society. These theorists stress that these realignment processes
are a subset of the general ways in which people interactively (“intersub-
jectively,” in their terms) craft their beliefs and values. Realignment en-
tails identifying “grievances” (areas where the political system has failed)
and creating new moral and political value frameworks that require
social change to address those grievances.
If frame realignment analysis opened up the conversation about
cultural factors in the rise and development of movements, the 1990s
saw a flood of new participants in that conversation. In that moment,
two forces converged to open up cultural approaches more fully. One
was the rise of so-called new social movement theory, developed initially
by European scholars. New social movement theory arose partly to help
explain a host of new movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s
that did not seem to fit the classic Marxian model of social change
driven by class conflict, the model that had been predominant in much
previous European social theory. The newness of the putatively new
social movements was said to consist of such things as a greater emphasis
on group values and lifestyles and less emphasis on social class, partly be-
cause most of these movements emerged from middle-class rather than
working-class constituencies. Environmentalist, feminist, antinuclear,
and nonconsumerist lifestyle movements were among a set of new social
movements that were aimed at issues not reducible to economic depri-
vation. While initially used to study this particular subset of movements,
new social movement theory offered insights on issues of consciousness
and identity that were seen as adaptable to the study of virtually any
kind of movement.
The second major force that helped to open up cultural approaches
is what was dubbed the “cultural turn” in U.S. social sciences, prompted
especially by analyses coming from interdisciplinary fields such as eth-
nic studies, women’s studies, American studies, and cultural studies, all
fields that paid particular attention to cultural matters, and by the rise
of cultural theory in two prominent forms, poststructuralism and neo-
Marxist cultural theory.2 Like new social movement theory, all these
trends stressed the interaction of cultural forces with material forces—or,
rather, saw these forces as inseparable. The confluence of European new
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Conclusion 375
social movement theory and this cultural turn in U.S. social science led
to a host of new cultural approaches to movement analysis that gained
greater prominence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries. These new cultural theories looked at things like storytelling in
movements, the role of emotions, the creation of collective movement
identities, the persuasive languages developed by movements, and the
use of dramatic rituals and performances.
A few words about each of these: Various kinds of narrative analy-
sis examine the structures of the stories told within movements and the
stories that circulate from movements out into the wider society. Nar
rative analyses look at how movements draw upon existing cultural
stories, alter those stories to fit their needs, and invent new stories
throughout every aspect of movement activity. These stories may be
long-range ones, rooting the movement in a history of struggle, or they
may be stories of victims and/or heroic resisters, intended to inspire
activists. It is apparent to any observer that one of the key facts about
most movements is that they arouse strong emotions, for and against
them, yet until recently emotional affect was seen as too subjective to be
measured and understood. Seeking to overcome the emphasis on dan-
gerous emotions in collective behavior, new approaches on the impor-
tant terrain of affect analysis have been developed over the past few
decades to show more precisely how movements draw upon and reshape
the emotional lives of participants and observers alike. One key aspect
of European new social movement theory that was widely adopted was
an emphasis on collective identity, an approach that looks at both how
social identity groups can be recruited into movements and how new
social identities (like Chicano/a/x or transgender) form within move-
ments and can spread later into the wider society. The classical field of
rhetoric (the art of persuasion) also entered the cultural analysis reper-
toire more fully in the wake of the cultural turn. Rhetorical analysis has
long examined one key component of many movements, public speeches
(such as “I Have a Dream”), but it also looks at other kinds of persuasion
at work in movements, especially verbal persuasion but also the roles of
images, gestures (including dance), sounds (including music), and other
symbolic systems. A different, related set of discourse analyses arose out
of new cultural theories collectively labeled “poststructuralist” and/or
“postmodernist.” More fully than traditional rhetorical analysis, these
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376 Conclusion
approaches focus on languages as systems that use us as much as we use

them. They focus on language as an underlying determining system,
and on the material conditions through which words and nonverbal
communication acts are performed. They ask about the relative cultural
authority of who represents what counts as social truth, and they note
the inevitable constraint on our beliefs, feelings, and actions in every
context, including that of radically transformative movements, due to
deep language structures of which we can never be fully conscious. Last
but not least, dramaturgical and performativity analyses look at the ritual
actions (like sit-ins and rallies) prominent in movements and focus on
movement events as particular manifestations of the theatrical presenta-
tions of power dynamics that pervade all of social life. Some of these
ritual performances serve to create solidarity within movements, while
others are aimed primarily outward to express the values and demands
of movements to the wider world.3
Even from these very basic summaries of highly complex theories
(and others could be added), it should be obvious that many of these
approaches overlap and to some extent complement one another. No
one of them alone can capture the full scope of movements as political
and cultural phenomena, but they offer a powerful set of analytic tools
to further our understanding of how movements rise and develop. Before
I turn to trying to put some aspects of these various approaches together,
it is important to look at a concept that to a great extent underlies them
all: culture.
CONCEPTUALIZING “CULTURE”
Critic Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Cul-
ture and Society, claims that culture is probably the most complicated
word in the English language.4 Recent arguments in cultural theory
have only deepened those complexities. It is not surprising, therefore,
that students of movements have not used the term culture in consistent
ways. That is one reason they are not likely to come to consensus about
the role of culture in movements. Culture is one of those concepts that
political theorists describe as “essentially contested”—that is, it is a con-
cept that matters so much to a given society that it is subject to more or
less constant debate.
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Conclusion 377
In the wake of the cultural turn in the social sciences, a few scholars
began to try to synthesize the most relevant portions of the traditional
approaches with more recent strands of culture theory. Addressing the
realm of U.S. sociology, Amy Swidler argues that part of the problem
was that sociologists had been drawing primarily upon one general the-
ory of culture, Max Weber’s, to the neglect of what Swidler views as a
more promising strand of theory, that of Marcel Mauss. Swidler asserts
that Weber’s rather thin theory of culture helps account for empirical
sociology’s relative neglect of cultural factors. Even those schools of
movement analysis (like frame analysis) that do examine cultural fac-
tors, she argues, are limited by certain Weberian assumptions about the
centrality of narrowly rational, goal-oriented individuals and the beliefs
they hold. They give far too much credit to individual, rational actors as
opposed to cultural systems that shape people collectively. Swidler
argues that Maussian approaches (in which she includes most cultural
studies work) can lead to much useful empirical research by focusing
not on fuzzy notions of culture as “ideas in people’s heads” but rather
on structural elements of culture—culture as embedded in institutions,
behaviors, and discourses that transcend and deeply shape individual
ideas and actions. Swidler suggests four overlapping targets for work
that takes culture seriously as a set of systemic, not vaguely “expressive,”
factors. First, focus on culture not as individually held beliefs but as
structures embedded in practices relatively independent of the beliefs
held by individual actors. Second, focus less on culture as what actors
themselves really think and more on culture as their “knowledge of how
others will interpret their actions.” Third, focus on “public contexts in
which cultural understandings are brought to bear,” functioning, again,
above the level of individual belief in ways that unite diverse actors.
Fourth, and finally, focus on cultural institutions as sites that set limits
and possibilities for movement activity.5 Swidler’s four key target areas,
though certainly not covering the entire range of frameworks and sites of
cultural importance in movements, offer a suggestive bridge from tradi-
tional structural approaches to cultural approaches. There is no doubt a
danger, in certain versions of such work, of moving too far in the direc-
tion of structures to the neglect of the ways in which, in even the most
controlled social situations, individual actors are capable of some degree
of free agency and/or are driven by uniquely personal configurations of
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378 Conclusion
psychological forces, but all of Swidler’s four foci are key to any full
understanding of the cultural forces working through movements.
Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier also address and try to synthe-
size competing intellectual frameworks of cultural analysis in an essay
that has the added advantage of grounding its arguments in a particular
set of movement case histories. They offer this suggestive summary of
some of the main schools relevant to thinking about the movement/
culture matrix:
Major approaches to the analysis of culture advance different con-
cepts, based on distinct epistemological frameworks, for analyzing
the relationship between symbolic forms and the structure of social
relations. For functionalists, culture is conceived as values and
norms, while Marxists and neo-Marxists analyze culture as ideol-
ogy and class consciousness. Symbolic interactionists emphasize
intersubjective meaning, focusing on the subjective dimension—
beliefs, goals, normative expectations, states, and motivations—
that underlie social interaction, while dramaturgical approaches
think of culture as ritual. A new generation of cultural theorists,
influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism, construe cul
ture as discourse.6
While, like my brief descriptions of schools of movement analysis above,

these are inevitably somewhat reductive characterizations of the various
theoretical approaches, Taylor and Whittier go on to show through
analysis of feminist groups that despite their bases in “distinct epistemo-
logical frameworks,” each of these approaches offers insight into how
movements work that can to some degree be synthesized. While efforts
like Swidler’s and Taylor and Whittier’s certainly have not ended dis-
putes about the nature and role of culture in movements, they have
helped to clarify points of tension and have offered grounds for arguing
more carefully about those differences.
One part of these general conceptual dilemmas is confusion in
thinking about culture in movements, which sometimes arises through
slippage between the two most common meanings of culture: culture as
a particular social arena (the high culture of the arts, mass-mediated
popular culture, and homespun folk culture) versus culture as the mean-
ing patterns in whole ways of life (as in “American culture”). Culture in
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Conclusion 379
the broader sense shapes all overarching arenas of life, not just the cul-
tural arena (in the more limited sense) but the economic, social, and
political arenas as well. The social, the political, the economic, and the
cultural (in the narrow sense) are all shaped by the meaning-making
processes we call “cultural” in the larger sense, but these processes func-
tion in varying ways in each of these arenas, and in none are they the sole
determining forces. Various material and institutional forces—especially,
I would argue, economic activity—have impacts that while always in-
terpreted culturally cannot be reduced to those interpretations. As French
social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s careful work on the specificity of the
cultural “field” (more or less synonymous with my use of “arena”) makes
clear, it is only semiautonomous in relation to the other major arenas/
fields. And, crucially, all these fields are intricately connected in what
Bourdieu calls the overall “field of power.” Put succinctly, all fields—
within the broadly social, economic, political, and cultural fields—meet
in, shape, and are shaped by this “field of power.”7 Keeping this schema
in mind can help us remember that these various arenas/fields are not
ultimately separable.
In general terms, each of these major arenas has its own set of
cultural norms and practices. And, in addition, each of these arenas has
numerous smaller cultures and subcultures within it, each as well with
specific sets of norms of thought and behavior, some formal (like laws),
most informal (like habits). Take the political arena, for example. We can
talk at the broadest level of a global political culture, then we can talk
a bit more specifically of a national political culture (French or Italian
politics), then we can talk of things that are a bit smaller, like the culture
of a particular political party, and then still smaller cultures like the cul-
ture of congressional staffers—and so on down to ever more narrowly
defined cultural spaces. And, most relevant to issues at hand, analysts can
examine the cultural processes at work within a given social movement
as its movement culture. In our metaphorical rendering, we can think
of cultures as nested like Russian matryoshka dolls, each with an ever
smaller one inside. But unlike those dolls, cultures do not have perfectly
defined boundaries; the nature and boundaries of cultures are always
contested, always argued about.
Cultures are never neatly segregated and bound entities; rather,
they are best conceived as partially overlapping, mutually interacting,
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380 Conclusion
internally contradictory, and nested entities with far from wholly distinct
or unchanging boundaries. In recent scholarship, cultural essentialism—
the conceptualization of individual cultures as internally consistent,
neatly bordered entities—has largely given way to an acknowledgment
of the role analysts play in “inventing” cultures through highly selective
representations of what count as the cultures of particular demographi-
cally constituted groups. Such selective representation occurs not just
for outside observers but also within any given cultural context. This
means any culture (or subculture) is an internally contested formation,
a fact that is perhaps even more obvious in relation to movement cul-
tures, since they tend to be consciously and openly contentious not only
in relation to the dominant culture they seek to change but also in their
internal debates over things like movement values and the best strate-
gies and tactics to employ.
Cultures exist not as natural facts but as true fictions constituted
by regimes of representation invoked in everyday life and scholarly inves-
tigation alike. All representations of a culture, whether by cultural insid-
ers (emic) or outsiders (etic), are true fictions in the sense that, however
empirically grounded, they occur from particular, limited, debatable
points of view. Cultural contexts are never simply given, never simply
presented, but must be represented in ways that are subject to question-
ing, both by group members and by outsiders and scholarly observers.
That cultures are contested does not mean that they are up for defini-
tional grabs by anyone who comes along. Many cultural contexts are
highly fluid and changeable, especially in the current era, but they are
not infinitely malleable. Claims about any given cultural phenomenon
have dominant and subordinate forms, a fact that gives rise to frequent
questioning of who gets to speak for a culture. Individuals and groups
claiming to speak for a culture have more or less privileged access to the
authority and means to enforce their claims, and there are always vary-
ing degrees of access to the dominant means of representation. On the
contemporary scene, important cultural claims are most often filtered
through mainstream, corporate mass media, and more recently through
various digital forms of new social media. Those media terrains them-
selves are always contested in terms of ideology (think CNN versus Fox
News), but they never represent the full range of possible political and
cultural notions. Hence, insurgent movements often offer alternative
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Conclusion 381
positions that they believe to be underrepresented or not represented at

all by any branch of corporate media.
This position argues that culture (as meanings, beliefs, ways of life)
is constructed by social “texts” or “discourses” at work in all the arenas
of society (economic, political, social, cultural), with increasing power
rooted in the cultural institutions and practices of the culture industries
dominated by major old and new media corporations. For example, an
upsurge or downswing in the national economy is materially affected by
the way in which the political economic data are interpreted through
“texts,” whether they be debates in economic journals, the speeches of
politicians, the comments of TV pundits, or the jokes of comedians.
This does not shift all focus away from things like economic activity.
In Raymond Williams’s terms, the political economic event is not abso-
lutely determinative, but it is determining; it does not create one, inev-
itable response, but it does limit the range of possible responses. This
means, in practical terms, that the cultural analysis of social movements
can never be isolated from these other levels. And vice versa—cultural
representations always play a role in creating social, political, and eco-
nomic realities, but the underlying reality of receiving a smaller paycheck
or defaulting on a mortgage does not disappear. That all levels of cul-
tural representation need to be understood as agents of change or resis-
tance to change, rather than simply as side effects of supposedly more
fundamental shifts in economics or politics, does not erase those other
fundamental factors.
While purely cultural, purely social, purely economic, and purely
political domains do not actually exist, it is nevertheless useful at points
to deploy these distinctions, to mark their borders. For one thing, cul-
ture can be a more or less politicized terrain, and any governmental or
socioeconomic activity can have more or less cultural contestation em-
bedded in it. It would be a great irony for any student of social move-
ments to insist on these absolute distinctions, since no force has done
more than social movements to challenge the borders separating these
arenas. Much social movement activity has demonstrated, insisted upon,
and enacted a political critique of culture and a cultural critique of the
social, the economic, and the political that challenges these bounda-
ries. Marxist movements seek to politicize the economy, civil rights
movements attack racist cultural institutions, women’s movements and
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382 Conclusion
LGBTQ movements insist that the “personal is political,” that private

realms are public, and so on. Political economy, cultural politics, social
cultural studies—these and similar border-crossing terms help remind
us of the dangers of isolating these domains even when we may need to
focus more fully on one or another of them.
THE FIELD(S) OF POWER

Bourdieu’s notion that all fields of social activity meet in the field of power
inevitably raises the question, What is power? In the analysis of move-
ments, whether by insiders or outsiders, much depends on the con
ception of power that is assumed. As social movement theorist Steven
Buechler notes, modern conceptions of power tend to fall into two
broad categories that cause confusion when not made explicit:
Much confusion about the political dimension of social move-

ments may be traced to inconsistent definitions of the term “polit-
ical” and the underlying conceptions of power implied by such
definitions. As an initial sorting device, we may distinguish between
at least two senses of “the political.” The term “state politics” will
be used to refer to the more conventional type of power struggle
in which social activism is directed toward influencing state policy
and leaders, including broad revolutionary challenges to the polit-
ical order. In this conception, power is centralized and hierarchi-
cal, although it can be challenged under the right circumstances
by sustained opposition. The term “social politics” will be used
to refer to a less conventional type of power struggle in which col-
lective action is directed toward altering power relations inscribed
in diverse social institutions and cultural practices, including the
seemingly “personal” aspects of everyday life. In this conception,
power is diffuse and decentralized, and challenges to this form
of power take a wider variety of tactical, strategic and expressive
forms. Both types of politics contain a mixture of oppositional
and transformative elements that qualify them as “political.”8
Buechler is here trying to balance more traditional notions of power

with those developed by recent theorists who argue that state-level pol-
itics can exist only when built up from a host of micropowers that exist
across a whole range of social sites. The balance he seeks is a conception
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Conclusion 383
in which the levels he dubs “state politics” and “social politics” interact
constantly. Neither top-down nor bottom-up theories of power alone
can account for the complex flows of power through a given culture.9
With regard to the concept of “social power,” Buechler seems to
be drawing primarily upon discourse analysis as formulated in the works
of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s concept of discourse offers a more expan-
sive method than that used in traditional forms of rhetorical analyses.
In his conception, micropolitics are embedded in the discourses that
pervade every aspect of society, from the most intimate personal levels to
the interactions of governments. Discourses in Foucault’s formulation
set deeply structured (and therefore mostly invisible) limits on what can
and cannot be thought or articulated. Discourses are always subject to
certain interactive, mutually influential engagements and contradictions.
Because they are manifold and contradictory, they limit the possibility
of fully stabile social formations. But they do not create unlimited free-
dom, and they also limit the possibilities of pure resistance. Power for
Foucault is rooted in discourses that do not float free, as some mistaken
critics of his work assume, but rather are embedded in specific iden
tities, institutions, material practices, and variably empowered social
locations.10
The dynamics of ACT UP offer particularly cogent examples of
how this conceptual problematic works itself out in movements. The
graphic artworks and other practices of ACT UP were frequently directed
simultaneously at the political economic realm in the form of federal
drug-funding policy, at the socioeconomic realm in the form of non-
governmental institutions like pharmaceutical corporations, and at the
cultural realm in the form of discursive practices in the mass media and
in aesthetic texts. Few in ACT UP argued for exclusive focus on only one
of these levels—although, as we saw in chapter 7, internal debates did
emerge around which of these targets was most important, and eventu-
ally spin-off groups sought to focus more intensely on one or another of
these arenas. ACT UP’s experience suggests that a continuum across
state, social, economic, and cultural “politics” often exists not only among
different movements but also within particular movements. Some move-
ments may fit relatively neatly into one location on this continuum, but
more often analysis must attend to considerable slippage in a given
movement along this continuum. Clearly, this task becomes even more
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384 Conclusion
imperative when the movement being examined is a complexly coali-

tional one addressing a range of issues, like the movement against cor-
porate globalization (see chapter 9).
As second-wave feminist Gloria Steinem once quipped, “Culture is
the name they give to the politics that wins.” This neatly encapsulates the
now commonplace theoretical insight that culture often functions for
those in power as a space to be legitimated as “transcending” politics, and
it also suggests why insurgent groups must insist on the opposite, that
the cultural realm is shot through with the political. But revealing the
political uses of culture is not the same thing as proving that all culture
is “merely” politics. What needs to be analyzed is the process through
which some cultural texts are politicized—by those in power or by those
challenging that power. One must also remember that the political uses
of aesthetic texts never exhaust their meanings. As I have argued about
the role of music in the Civil Rights movement (see chapter 1), move-
ment cultures function best when they both express and move beyond
ideology. Ideologies—in the sense of elaborated key ideas and values—
are crucially important to any movement. But they are also often points
of contention that pull movements apart. As I have shown in a number
of the preceding chapters, the very vagueness of “culture” that has kept
many social scientists from examining it seriously as a movement force
is precisely one of its virtues when it serves to link activists together
despite competing ideas.
Clarity around conceptions of power is crucial not just to the anal-
ysis of movements but to the internal self-understanding of movements
as well, especially with regard to their targeting of various potential are-
nas. Movement self-understanding is an evolving (cultural) phenomenon
because, as one group of veteran activist-theorists notes, “no movement
is born knowing what it thinks, what it wants, and how to achieve its
goals. . . . [But] any movement develops a self-understanding, whether
a tacit set of assumptions expressed primarily in action, a formalized the-
ory, or something in between.”11 With regard to ACT UP, for example,
a strict poststructuralist theorist might look at the range of the group’s
activity and declare that it offers evidence that a Foucauldian-Derridean
cultural politics can challenge state power (contra those who claim that
it has “merely cultural” impacts). In contrast, a more traditionally trained
empirical theorist might argue that pragmatically oriented voices within
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Conclusion 385
ACT UP “saved” that group from the irrelevance of a cultural politics by

directing some of its actions toward state power. An ideologically and
methodologically less purist position would suggest that an ideological
mix within ACT UP itself left these questions strategically unresolved
in ways that may have contributed to the group’s various successes.
To argue, as much so-called cultural analysis of movements does,
that material conditions do not tell the whole story is far different from
leaving them out of the story altogether. The power to name reality for
others has always been a component of exploitation. That it is more so
today is at best debatable. This is the kind of argument that draws atten-
tion away from, for example, the material conditions of the production
of personal computers and focuses exclusively on the information flows
made possible by the computers and their networks. In place of the
swing between fully determining material conditions (naive structural-
ist bias) and free-floating/flowing information (naive discursive bias),
the most useful theories, like those of Donna Haraway, use terms like
material-discursive to conceptualize the complex of social interactions.12
Not only do “ideas become a material force when they are gripped by
the masses” (Marx), but also, in various more subtle, daily ways, lan-
guage as a material force is always entangled with institutions and extra-
linguistic structures—reducing these to disembodied “signs” leads to
analytic confusion or incoherence.
MOVEMENT CULTURES
With these general conceptual schemas and caveats in mind, we can
turn to talk more specifically about the roles that culture plays in protest
movements. Thinking about these roles can be divided into three main
elements: the cultural contexts that give rise to a movement, the move-
ment culture that forms at the center of the movement, and the impact
of the movement in turn on the wider culture. These three processes, of
course, do not take place in some neat line of causality, but instead
interact throughout the life and afterlife of a given movement.
I want to start at the center of the movement/culture dynamic,
with those discourses and practices that make up what is generally called
a movement culture. This is the culture formed by the most committed
participants, the core of the corps. Movement cultures consist of specific
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386 Conclusion
variants of the same elements that make up any cultural group—shared

values, styles, behaviors, languages, traditions, symbols, and related forms
of group definition. A given movement may be analyzed in terms of
one overarching culture (Chicano/a/x movement culture) or in terms of
smaller nested cultures that differ in specifics of style, value, and/or ide-
ology (the minister-driven culture of the early Civil Rights movement
differed in all these ways from the student-driven culture that developed
later in the movement, for example). A movement-specific ideology or set
of beliefs is perhaps the most conscious marker of a movement culture,
but much of a movement culture may be unspoken, invisible, or taken
for granted. Tangible markers of a movement culture might include
such things as special ways of talking (a shared slang, or movement-
specific slogans), rituals or ritualized behaviors (singing in a circle, a
special kind of handshake), uniforms or stylized clothing (ethnicity-
specific clothing, overalls to mark sympathy with poor farmers), sym-
bols (a black panther, an Aztec eagle), material culture objects (buttons,
masks), movement lore (stories of past victories and defeats, jokes about
an opponent’s follies), and identification with tradition (revival of a
suppressed or forgotten ethnic custom or refusal to use the dominant
culture’s language). And, of course, cultural form in the narrower sense
of the arts plays a central role. This is especially true of particular
movement-identified forms of artistic expression (black freedom songs,
Chicano/a/x murals), but it is also true to a lesser but important degree
for any work of art experienced in the context of a movement culture
(passing around a print of Picasso’s Guernica in an antiwar movement
group meeting, sharing the kind of environmental justice novel dis-
cussed in chapter 8 with a movement reading circle).
The key work of a movement culture is the generation of the
group’s social vision—the articulation of grievances and the steps needed
to redress those grievances. The basic form of this work is what one
school of analysis calls the frame alignment process, the process of shift-
ing cultural understanding first within and then outside the movement
to reflect the movement’s analysis of the problem(s) and solution(s).
This is never less than a complex process, but in the kind of multi-issue
movements covered in this book, frame alignment seems a weak way to
describe a set of transformations involving vast changes in thought, emo-
tion, moral values, and whole ways of being. Movement cultures shape
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Conclusion 387
not only the particular articulations of framing ideas and ideologies but
also a participant’s whole being, deeply shaping embodied experience
at conscious and nonconscious levels. This is especially true of move-
ments that seek not just to create new ideas but also to enact those ideas
through their own movement’s cultural interactions (prefigurative—
attempting to model a future society). This is where works of visionary
art that go beyond the level of ideas can prove especially effective and
affective. In a less extensive and intensive but important way, other
cultural practices provide a grounding force of solidarity that allows
often complex and contentious debate to flourish. Things like dancing
together and working together on the creation of a giant puppet provide
respite from debates about ideals and tactics and also help reinforce a
sense of the collective, a sense of solidarity that can lessen the tensions
that arise from differences.
One of the more important aspects of movement cultures that
includes but goes beyond the direct discussion of ideas or frames of intel-
lectual reference has been labeled collective identity formation. As noted
above, a whole branch of the new social movement school of analysis
began the elaboration of this process.13 Identity transformation is a com
plicated phenomenon, one inadequately theorized by such concepts as
identity politics. Movement-bred identities are neither true selves to be
defended nor disabling essences to be avoided. They are strategically
necessary creations that change as movements change. It is primarily
from outside movements or in moments of movement decline that such
identities are turned into static forms defended in absolutist terms.
Much social science study of social movements is still based in a “ratio-
nal actor” model of the individual subject. Whatever limited utility this
model of identity may have had for understanding the modern, indus-
trial actor, it has far less application to the postmodern, often digitally
embedded subject of most recent social movements. Identities are not
frozen forms into which new content can be poured. Nor are they indi-
vidual creations. All identities are to some degree collective identities.
This is particularly clear with regard to movements that reclaim and to
a degree re-create traditionally marginalized identities (ethnics of color,
lesbians, and so on), but it is equally true that white males have always
practiced and continue to practice identity politics—they have just had
the power to act as though their identity is universal.
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388 Conclusion
Social movements have been and remain among the key forces
transforming/creating new cultural identities (transgender movements
are a recent example). The egalitarian spirit inside the movements sur-
veyed in this book was a particularly rich source for ongoing experiments
in identity formation and transformation. A more nuanced understand-
ing of the construction of identities within movements can benefit future
movements, but it can also explain more generally the nature of contem
porary culture, where the social construction of identities is more widely
recognized and the struggle over identities is arguably more intense than
in previous eras. Tracing the means by which cultural identities are cre-
ated is therefore of growing importance. In our time, both traditional
mass media and emergent new social media play increasingly active roles
in these identity constructions, and thereby in movement identity for-
mation as well (as stressed in chapter 10 on Occupy). The move from
print to broadcast media to networked computing and other new media
has shaped identity generally and movement identities specifically. And
by looking at identity formation in movements, we can learn a great
deal about these complex processes. Alongside and entwined with new
media, movements have been major forces in the creation of the con-
temporary emphasis on identities.14
At the same time, a proper understanding of social movement iden-
tities can be a useful corrective to the limits of so-called identity politics.
The inherent paradox is that “identity politics” can exist only when
identities are in question. Identity becomes an issue only when it is no
longer presumed, no longer taken for granted. This means that identi-
ties emerging from self-conscious political struggles are always unstable
formations. This should be clear immediately from reflection on the
evolution and proliferation of identities over the past few decades. To
illustrate this simply through self-naming, one could show how a seem-
ingly stable racial signifier changes through the politically evolving sense
of self embodied in a succession of terms: Negro, black, Afro-American,
African American, member of the African diaspora. Each of these succes-
sive identities could be shown to indicate not only ideological shifts
but also the conflicting influence of various interacting class, gender,
national, regional, and sexual identities. Assertions of essential “black”
identity in the face of these changes, embedded as they are in shifts in
racial formations of the culture at large, have never gone unchallenged,
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Conclusion 389
particularly when they have emerged in the dynamic context of a move-

ment. Attention to these movement-driven transformations has been one
key to understanding race as a social construction rather than a biologi-
cal reality.
Much attention has focused rightly on the collective identities
produced in movements, but less attention has been paid to how cul-
tural forms in and around movements help shape movement identities
that later become available as general, cultural identities in the larger
society. The Black Power movement and its aligned black arts cultural
formation, for example, invented a militant black self that eventually
became widely diffused as a key element of a more autonomous, em-
powered “Afro-American” identity. As I have suggested with regard to
the Black Panthers, this process included something like the transfor-
mation of some tough street-corner hustlers into “badass revolutionar-
ies,” a move that carried over into parts of the wider black community,
strengthening self-esteem and raising the level of resistance a notch even
among those not consciously self-identifying as political.
These issues are particularly important if, as Sidney Tarrow has
argued, we are becoming a “movement society” in which social move-
ments play an increasingly central role in, among other things, defining
collective identities.15 Movements are surely one of the main sources for
the phenomena that have led some postmodern theorists to claim that
identities are more fluid and variable than ever before. One need not
embrace this notion uncritically to agree that movements as sources of
identity are likely to continue to be a major social force.
In terms of the nested set of cultures surrounding and interwoven
into any given movement culture, organizational cultures have often
been of particular importance. The nature and functions of the formal
and informal organizations present in any movement are of crucial im-
portance internally but also in the ways movements interact with sur-
rounding cultural contexts. Internally, organizational structures always
to some degree embody or represent the values as well as the tactics of
movements. These factors in turn shape who speaks for movements and
what movements emphasize in their public acts and comments to the
media. In the movements surveyed in this text, organizational cultures
have often been the subject of much debate. Sometimes differing organi
zational cultures coexist peacefully in a movement and can be recognized
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390 Conclusion
as complementary. At other times, organizational difficulties can tear a

movement apart. Most often, differences exist in a terrain somewhere
between these extremes. In the Civil Rights movement, for example,
tensions arose when the charismatic, top-down, minister-centered work
of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was challenged
by the more group-centered horizontal leadership model of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The challenge to organizational
structures in SCLC by SNCC reflected not just a difference in tactics
but a broad difference in philosophy regarding how power works and
who is or is not going to be empowered via the social transformation
the movement desires. For a time, the two approaches managed to work
more or less in independent harmony, but eventually they went their
separate ways. Debate about organizational cultures has become endemic
to the tradition of left and progressive movements and has played a
profound role in the cultural relations in these movements, from the
Civil Rights movement to arguments about the role of leaders in the
Occupy movement (chapter 10), Black Lives Matter (chapter 2), and
most others. Various culturally shaped differences arising from factors
like age/generation, social class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender have
all played a role in the formation of and clashes among organizational
cultures within movements and in movement cultures overall. A corol-
lary of these clashes surrounds the question of the extent to which cer-
tain movement roles should be professionalized, as opposed to being
performed by rotating volunteers.
A crucial element in the making of movement cultures is that they
recruit from and to some extent transform existing social networks and/
or subcultures. While isolated individuals join movements, much of the
crucial process of movement recruitment occurs through formal and in-
formal social networks. These networks vary in size and cohesiveness,
from families to transnational organizations. Movements benefit greatly
when they can recruit people who are already organized in networks
such as those that form around churches, neighborhoods, schools, clubs,
unions, civic organizations, and a host of other social and recreational
commonalities. Church networks, for example, have been equally im-
portant to progressive causes such as the Civil Rights movement and
right-wing ones like the antiabortion movement. Social networks can
be more or less political in nature, but even partially political networks
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Conclusion 391
like labor unions undergo some degree of transformation when they be-
come part of movements, as was the case when the United Farm Work-
ers expanded to become a larger movement. In the era of new social
media, social networks have both proliferated and become more acces-
sible to movement organizers. The relative openness of social media
platforms like Facebook and Twitter makes it easier for movements to
tap into networks of potential recruits.
A subculture is a special, more fully developed or elaborated type
of social network. Subcultures may be ethnic, class based, generational,
aesthetic, religious, or otherwise social in various combinations. Like net-
works in general, they can be more or less overtly political in orienta
tion. But subcultures differ from movement cultures proper to the extent
that they do not always centrally employ strategies that directly challenge
the existing political, economic, or social system. In traditional terms,
some subcultures may function more instrumentally (with direct social
impacts), while others take more expressive or aesthetic forms that
do not directly challenge dominant culture. But these dimensions are
never fully separable, as evidenced by the fact that supposedly merely
expressive subcultures have often been drawn into more overtly political
action. Some subcultures, like the one surrounding punk rock, for ex-
ample, contain disruptive elements that lend themselves well to support
of social movements. In this case, some punk strains have moved to the
left, identifying with anarchist elements of the global justice movements,
while other strands, like the skinheads, have lent support to reactionary
and even fascist movements. Some subcultures are, rhetorically at least,
overtly oppositional (and sometimes therefore called countercultures)
with regard to the dominant culture, while others are content to be
alternative, in a live-and-let-live sense. The fields of cultural studies and
sociology have both done much to explore the nature and meaning(s) of
subcultures.16 But each has shown some of the biases that mar its work
generally in relation to movement study. That is, some cultural studies
work presumes a degree of political contestation built into primarily
aesthetically oriented subcultures that exaggerates their political impact
(with every rock song and video somehow seen as resistant). Conversely,
much of the sociological study of subcultures has had far too little to
say about the symbolic challenges that even relatively nonpolitical sub-
cultures do sometimes offer in opening up alternative visions that can
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392 Conclusion
facilitate recruitment into more directly political movements. As I have

suggested in my discussion of anti-apartheid rock concerts (chapter 5),
for example, the often quite superficial rebelliousness that is built into
rock music performance can lend itself to a deepening by movement
activists into something truly oppositional politically.
Subcultures have often been especially rich recruitment networks
for movements. This was true, for example, of certain elements of the
hippie subculture with regard to the anti–Vietnam War and student
movements of the 1960s, and it is true for certain hip-hop subcultures
in relation to Black Lives Matter. At times, movements become almost
indistinguishable from subcultures in their degree of elaboration, and
in doing so make more active the symbolic challenges implicit in many
subcultures. At other times this process can reverse itself, such that a
movement culture evolves into a less overtly active subculture. While
often criticized by activists as a devolution, at times—as Verta Taylor
points out with regard to groups during the “doldrums period” of the
women’s movement—the transformation of a movement community
into a subculture with a less overtly political agenda can provide an
“abeyance structure” that keeps movement values and goals alive until a
new phase of more overt movement activity can emerge.17 One particu-
lar kind of subculture that plays an obviously vital role in, among other
things, moving through doldrums is the activist subculture. Activist sub-
cultures, made up of people who work in a number of different move-
ments, form over time. Members of activist subcultures can bring vital
tactical, strategic, and other kinds of knowledge and can provide a sense
of continuity across movements that address differing aspects of the
wider terrain of social change. Activists from labor unions, from long-
standing groups like the NAACP, and from the socialist and communist
parties of the 1930s played a key role in conveying strategy and tactics
to the new Civil Rights movement, both individually and through insti-
tutions like Highlander Folk School. In turn, activists from the Civil
Rights movement carried the master protest frame of that movement
into the women’s, gay, student, antiwar, and other movements of the
1960s. Likewise, alterglobalization activists played key roles in the early
stages of Occupy.
Activist subcultures can also, however, be sources of ideological
and/or generational conflict when longtime activists fail to note and
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Conclusion 393
respect cultural differences and differences in historical context in their

work with new movements. In both the Civil Rights movement and
Occupy, tensions arose that were partly generational, the result of activist
subcultures trying to transfer knowledge to a new context. Negotiating
the process of finding a respectful mode of internal education between
long-standing and new activists is often a crucial aspect of movement
success.
Because subcultures exist, by definition, in some degree of dis-
tance from mainstream cultures (with the prefix sub- suggesting their
lower status from the point of view of the dominant), they always exist
as potentially political forces. Rastafarian religious subculture in Jamaica,
for example, always had the potential to be turned from alternative to
oppositional to openly political form, but it took the influence of the
new black nationalist movement cultures of the late 1960s and the
conscious work of figures like Bob Marley to bring forth that potential.
Subcultural force has to be mobilized or folded into social movements
to reach its full disruptive potential. Ethnic subcultures have played
particularly important roles in recent movements, but they too are not
automatically politically oppositional (as arguments about the virtue or
vice of relative cultural assimilation make clear). Ethno-racialized people
in a U.S. context can be said in some sense to form an overarching sub-
culture due to their marginalization within white-dominant America,
but these larger formations never translate fully into a movement cul-
ture. To take but one example from this book, in chapter 4 we saw
how selected elements of Mexican and Mexican American ethnic sub
cultures were adopted and adapted by and for the movement culture of
the Chicano/a/x movimiento. And the adoption of the politicized ethnic
label Chicano, in place of a more neutral or assimilated term like Mexi-
can American or Hispanic, itself sought with some success to claim this
movement-bred identity as the definition of the ethnic group more
broadly. But that identification was not adopted by all members of this
ethno-racial demographic.
The political meaning of subcultures is also shaped by the degree
of tolerance for alternatives that exist in a given society. In totalitarian
or highly controlled societies, any form of subcultural activity (religious,
aesthetic, ethnic) can be perceived as threatening. Conversely, more open,
putatively democratic societies can tolerate a great deal of subcultural
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394 Conclusion
activity. Indeed, they use this openness to diversity of style and ideol-
ogy to bolster their claim to being wholly just societies. But at the point
where subcultures become serious threats to the dominant culture’s eco-
nomic or political system, that tolerance disappears. When that point of
threat is reached, however, subcultures can sometimes be politicized
rapidly. This process was at work, for example, at the Stonewall Inn in
Greenwich Village in 1969 when police, by pushing some “queers” too
far, drove an underground subculture to the surface, helping to ignite a
gay liberation movement. While occasionally an entire subculture may
transform into a movement culture, more often only some members of
a given subculture come to the conclusion that they wish to expand
their subculture into a wider frame, or that the existence of their sub
culture can be sustained only by political action. This situation varies
greatly from society to society even within the democratic West. The
United States, for example, has had fewer and far less elaborated sub
cultures than England or Western Europe. This helps to account for the
greater emphasis placed on subcultures as movement cultures or sites
for the launching of movements in the work of European new move-
ment theorists like Alberto Melucci.
CULTURAL FORMATIONS, AESTHETIC IDEOLOGIES,

AND MASS MEDIA(TION)
In addition to their connections with networks and subcultures, move-
ment cultures (with their relatively well- defined, ideologically self-
conscious, but usually narrow core constituencies) are linked in various
degrees to cultural formations (with their more diffuse, less ideologi-
cally conscious, but often broader constituencies) that shape and are
reshaped especially by the art forms that play through movements. Cul-
tural and intellectual formations form a kind of large penumbra around
movements. They may begin in the arts or in other intellectual circles
and move closer to the orbit of a movement, or they may be largely
generated by a movement, or, as is most often the case, they may inter-
act dialectally with a movement, such that the question of who is the
chicken and who is the egg becomes irrelevant.18 Like subcultures, cul-
tural formations can have wide or narrow agendas in terms of opposi-
tion to dominant cultural forms, but unlike fully formed movement
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Conclusion 395
cultures, they may consider their first concerns to be aesthetic or aca-

demic, rather than directly political. Often, however, especially in recent
decades, formation discourses include a questioning of these dichoto-
mies (for example, as chapter 10 shows, many art formations were drawn
into and changed by the Occupy movement in part because they already
believed art and politics cannot be fully separated). Although they may
seemingly precede the rise of a movement culture, formations can often
be shown to have some part of their origins in previous social move-
ments. Folksingers in the 1960s, for example, whether they knew it or
not, acknowledged it or not, owed the existence and much of the con-
tent of their cultural formation to the People’s Songs movement of the
1930s Communist Party USA. For some intellectual/cultural forma-
tions, like the field of ecocriticism and environmental justice novels as
they were both shaped by strands of environmentalism (see chapter 8),
the connection between movement and formation is more parallel than
directly overlapping. At other times, cultural formations are virtually
coextensive with a movement culture, as was the case with what Michael
Denning has called the “cultural front” formation that emerged out of
the radical labor and communist movements in the United States in the
1930s, and as was the case with much of the black arts formation of
the 1960s. The 1960s also spawned intellectual formations, including
women’s and ethnic studies, that closely aligned initially with the move-
ments that sparked them and then later evolved in broader directions
not as closely tied to movement-defined goals.
Cultural formations also can be shaped or reshaped, both quite
directly and less so, by emergent social movement cultures. Many pro-
test songs arise from outside movements but in close connection to them,
for example. At other times these formations develop more slowly and
indirectly over time in ways that may or may not acknowledge their debt
to an original set of movement ideas and practices. While writers like
Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston acknowledge a strong debt
to women-of-color feminisms, other writers may not acknowledge or
recognize such a connection, yet any close analysis of their work would
reveal the impact of the movement. On some occasions, parts of a cul-
tural formation can be absorbed fully into a social movement culture
(as with those European Dadaists who joined the communist move-
ment), but usually the process is more mixed, as in the case of rap music,
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396 Conclusion
which has a range from more overtly political “message” rap to implic-
itly oppositional forms to co-opted commercial modes.
When analyzing a given cultural formation, Michael Denning
argues, it is useful to distinguish between “cultural politics” and “aes-
thetic ideologies.” He uses the term cultural politics to name the com-
plex of political and institutional affiliations, “the politics of letterheads
and petitions, the stances taken by artists and intellectuals,” and the his-
tory of the cultural-political institutions in which the new formation is
embedded. Aesthetic ideologies, on the other hand, refers to the politics of
form, the actual aesthetic practices, the genres, styles, and conventions
that emerge to embody aspects of the general cultural politics.19 Depend-
ing on the degree of autonomy insisted upon by the artists and intel-
lectuals involved, the cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies may be
closely aligned or widely diverging. Some politically committed artists
see their art as a “weapon” in the struggle, some equally committed ones
insist that their politics and their art are fully separable, and most find
positions between these poles. Frequently within the same cultural for-
mation (and certainly in the same movement culture) there are several
different aesthetic ideologies that need to be sorted out and judged
against specific aesthetico-political criteria. Judging forms ranging from
ephemeral works of agitprop to aesthetically complex works by the same
criteria has often led to dismissive evaluations of all political art. In the
1930s, for example, the leftist cultural front contributed significantly to
both major works of art like the film Citizen Kane and ephemeral works
designed only for a very specific audience of workers on a picket line.
Similarly, the movements and cultural formations of the 1960s produced
street theater meant to be effective for a few days and also contributed
to the creation of brilliant works of literary art by writers like Toni Mor-
rison and Adrienne Rich that will be read for hundreds of years.
This raises the difficult question of the relation between politics and
aesthetics. There is no space to tackle that extremely complicated terrain
here, but let me offer a general principle on which scholars as different
as Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu agree: the logic of politics
and the logic of aesthetic objects seldom, if ever, perfectly coincide. In
Bourdieu’s terms, the economies of culture and the economies of poli-
tics overlap and interact in a variety of ways, but they are never simply
coextensive. Each “field” is subject to internal rules and regularities that
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Conclusion 397
are peculiarly its own. As mentioned above, the fields meet in that over-
arching terrain he names the “field of power,” but the meeting points
in the field of power never exhaust the meanings of serious works of art,
and political meanings have their own, differing forms. Put differently,
any aesthetic text can be put to political ends, and all aesthetic texts have
political implications, but no aesthetic text is reducible to its political
meanings. Political meanings are not given, they must be interpreted.
And acts of interpretation are always grounded in the social relations of
readers/audiences, including movement actors and movement observers
as interpreters.
Two paradoxical observations by important thinkers of the political-
aesthetic dynamic can perhaps reinforce this point: “The [ideological]
tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is
also correct in the literary sense” (Walter Benjamin), and “The conflict
between politics and art . . . cannot and must not be solved” (Hannah
Arendt). Benjamin reminds us that form and function are always in-
tertwined, and Arendt reminds us that the meanings of significant (i.e.,
not just instrumental) works of art always exceed their ideological
reduction.
As I will discuss in the section below on the various roles played
by the arts in movements, one crucial role of aesthetically complex, seri-
ous art (as opposed to more purely instrumental forms) is to critique
and transcend ideology.20 Aesthetically rich texts are always both ideo-
logical and more than ideological. They offer deep cultural resonances
(think of old spirituals in the Civil Rights movement) and they can re-
mind activists, who often are tempted by the pressures of political strug-
gle into ideologically reductive positions, that the full lived complexity
of cultural life cannot be reduced to any ideological system.
While movements can be quite culturally creative, culture in move-
ments is never pure, never purely the creation of a movement. Various
mainstream cultural forces continue to play through movement cultures.
For one thing, it is neither possible nor desirable to invent a full culture
out of hand (not every element of mainstream culture is ideologically
“tainted”). For another, it is impossible to remain isolated from the con-
tinuing flow of mainstream culture (even deeply separatist movements
maintain some reliance on the dominant system). The midmovement
adoption of some elements of a movement culture by the mainstream
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398 Conclusion
may require the movement culture to reshape itself to retain its resistant
otherness. For example, white youth participating in SNCC’s Freedom
Summer adopted blue jeans to express solidarity with poor black farm-
ers. But when jeans became widely fashionable in the late 1960s, they
ceased to function as a marker of movement cultural solidarity.
Conversely, one way to keep mainstream culture at bay is through
appropriation via parody. Movements frequently take elements of main-
stream culture and put movement twists on them. For instance, the
appropriation and parody of mainstream music is found in many move-
ments. Another example is ACT UP’s use of mainstream advertising
techniques, a practice elaborated into a full-fledged movement unto itself
in the form of groups like Adbusters and others of the “culture jamming”
school of social action.21 This process of appropriation and counter
appropriation can become quite elaborate over time. Nike Corporation,
for example, at the height of protests against its allegedly exploitative
labor practices, invited consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader to appear
in one of its television ads, presumably on the calculated gamble that
audiences would infer that any corporation hip enough to feature one of
its prime critics in its advertising could not be all bad (Nader refused).22
Clearly, like the boundaries between and among the political, the
social, the economic, and the cultural, boundaries between subcultures,
cultural formations, and movement cultures are in practice often quite
fluid. No cultural form can remain wholly oppositional or become wholly
co-opted; context is everything in terms of the political valence of any
cultural text. In any full examination of cultural activity in and around
social movements, it is analytically useful to work through something
like this range of more or less distinct components, and to give the
name movement cultures to those contexts that most explicitly and fully
turn cultural forms into sources for wider social change.
In the life cycle of a given movement—and in terms of larger cycles
of protest—cultural formations, subcultures, and movement cultures
undergo various processes of evolution and interaction. Much of this
dynamic can be analyzed well through Raymond Williams’s notion of
“residual, emergent, and dominant” cultural processes.23 Cultural forma-
tions, subcultures, and movement cultures all draw upon elements from
each of these three stages of cultural evolution. The Civil Rights move-
ment, for example, drew upon a residual folk cultural form, the spiritual,
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Conclusion 399
and turned it into a major resource for the movement. The Black Power
movement, on the other hand, harnessed an emergent pop cultural form,
soul music, that better suited the purposes of its work in urban arenas.
On a different scale, the black liberation struggle overall can be said to
have shifted gears to the Black Power phase when the Civil Rights move-
ment had passed from an emergent into a dominant movement culture
form that was felt as a constraint on some current and many new mem-
bers of the movement community. At that same historical moment,
however, as the Civil Rights repertoire of nonviolent resistance tactics
was passing from dominant to residual for some black activists, it was
being translated into emergent movements for human rights among
women and LGBTQI2+ folks.
Similar logics are at play in the ways in which subcultures and
cultural formations move in and out of movement culture orbits. Some-
times a movement culture can revive a cultural formation or a subcul-
ture, as Occupy seemed to reinvigorate the art scene in New York. And
sometimes an emergent subculture or cultural formation can reinvigo-
rate a movement culture. Often this process is so mutually reinforcing
that it is difficult to tell which force is the dynamic one in the relation-
ship, but making that determination is less important than understand-
ing how the forces work in a symbiosis that furthers the aims of both.
Cultural context always matters. Take, for example, the protest songs of
Bob Dylan. The meaning and resonance of his songs varied greatly from
when he sang in the context of movement culture of SNCC in Green-
wood, Mississippi, in 1964 to when he sang later that year at the March
on Washington where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to
when he sang in the context of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 as
part of the folk revival cultural formation to when the songs went out
to the wider mass culture via radio and vinyl. Each of these contexts no
doubt worked to support the Civil Rights movement, but each location
did so differently, with a more or less direct impact. The most direct
impact, when Dylan sang to SNCC workers and three hundred local
farmers in Greenwood, reached the smallest audience, while the least
direct impact, via record album and radio play, reached the largest. In that
sense, we could play off depth of impact versus breadth, with no need to
offer a value judgment as to relative importance. Each mode, from face-
to-face to mass-mediated, had and continues to have a role to play.
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400 Conclusion
The case of hip-hop can likewise illustrate something of the com-

plicated interactions among movement cultures, cultural formations, and
subcultures. Hip-hop began in the 1970s as an urban subculture on the
streets of New York. To a significant extent, some of its texts drew upon
Civil Rights and Black Power discourses to understand and articulate
the devastating economic conditions faced by those living in the so-
called black and brown ghettos. Hip-hop then fairly quickly evolved
into a wider cultural formation and then into a veritable culture in-
dustry. But, as detailed in chapter 2, hip-hop never completely lost its
connection to movement cultures and subcultures such that it was not
difficult when the Black Lives Matter movement emerged for activists to
connect to the hip-hop cultural formation, not only inspiring movement-
supportive work by major existing artists like Kendrick Lamar but also
bringing forth texts from within the new movement culture by activists
like the brother and sister of police-slain Eric Garner.
Further out from the movement culture, but intimately woven into
it, is the realm of mass culture and the mass media that enable it. Com-
munication scholars use the term mediation to describe the ways in which
ideas, images, and other aspects of cultural exchange move through and
across various modes, from face-to-face to ever wider circles, out to the
widest terrain of mass media. The Civil Rights movement is gener-
ally seen as the first movement to be shaped significantly by the (then
relatively new) medium of television. And ever since, movements have
found it important to think about how mass media portray their activi-
ties. How major news organizations represent an emerging movement’s
work can make or break that movement, and over time a complex dance
of representation and counterrepresentation evolves between activists
and media professionals. In most movements, including all of those
surveyed in this book, the role of media spokesperson is a significant
one. Movements can never fully control how they are portrayed by mass
media, but savvy interactions with reporters are of great importance.
Just as movements develop framing narratives, so too do media organi-
zations fit protests and other movement activities into certain typical
frames. Part of the job of contemporary activists is to learn how to
anticipate and shift these media frames to more accurately portray their
movements’ intentions and meanings.24 As traced especially in chapters
9 and 10, the rise of new media social networking capabilities has added
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Conclusion 401
a significant new dimension to movements’ media portrayals, with both

positive aspects (with regard to movement self-representation) and neg-
ative aspects (with regard to manipulation and fake news).
DEGREES OF MOVEMENT CULTURE ELABORATION

While all movements develop some type of movement culture, such cul
tures can be more or less intensive or elaborated, more or less bounded
or porous, and therefore more or less important to a movement’s work.
Movement cultures seldom correspond fully to any single movement
organization. More often they include what Steven Buechler has termed
“social movement communities”—“informal networks of activists with
fluid boundaries.”25 Often they bleed out into more amorphous but in-
fluential formations like the “cultures of solidarity” that Rick Fantasia
sees as feeding into the labor movement.26
John Lofland offers a schema for measuring movement culture
intensity that, whatever the merits of its particulars, provides a useful
starting point for thinking about the component parts and qualities of
such that make movement cultures more central or less central to the
movement in general.27 Lofland divides the terrain of movement culture
into six dimensions: values, objects (material culture), stories, occasions
(particular rituals, events), roles (specialized to create, perform, and dis-
seminate movement ideas and values), and personae (modelers of move-
ment identities). He further suggests that each of these elements should
be examined for intensity across six qualities: sharing (how widely the
elements are held in common), distinctiveness (how close or distant from
mainstream culture or other movement cultures), scope (narrow to wide
focus of cultural alternatives offered), elaboration (degree of complex-
ity of interaction among cultural elements), quantity (sheer volume
of objects, forms, ideas), and expressiveness (degree of emotional depth
evoked in group members). A model like this can generate a continuum
between extremes of strong and weak movement cultures and can help
isolate the impact of degrees of movement culture strength on other
aspects of movement activity. In what ways, for what kinds of move-
ments, is a strong cultural base important? In what ways, and for what
kinds of movements, is a strong cultural base less important or even
counterproductive? A “consensus movement,” for example, might be
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402 Conclusion
adversely affected in its search for the broadest possible constituency

by a developed cultural formation, while, conversely, strong cultural
bases often have been crucial to the recruitment of people to ethnic
movements. Sometimes the intensity of movement culture furthers a
movement’s diffusion, and sometimes it hinders diffusion. In the case
of the Civil Rights movement, one could argue that it did both. While
the African American musical culture examined in chapter 1 traveled
into other movements—“We Shall Overcome,” for example, became
virtually universally available—that change of context undercut much
of the music’s specific power and may at times have strained race rela-
tions when its use was seen as white appropriation (one factor in the rise
of separatist black movements).
One key area of movement intensity where the arts are especially
important is in promoting an understanding of the central role that emo-
tions play in life and in the life of a movement. Movements can be more
or less intense in terms of their emotional resonance, but all movements
mobilize emotions. Recall that the collective behavior school, in linking
movements to things like mob actions and riots, codes emotion primarily
negatively as irrational. Several forces have brought about a new under-
standing of affect that has significant implications for movements. First,
feminist movements have done much to reveal the sexist bias that has
coded emotion as feminine and therefore less significant than putatively
more masculine thought and reason. Second, and arising partly from this
feminist critique, affect theory has become an important area of social
movement analysis, one that has given emotions a more central and
balanced role in movements.28 Third, the field of social psychology has
helped movement theorists move beyond dismissing emotions as too
personal or individual to warrant study. And finally, recent develop-
ments in the field of neuroscience have deepened understanding of the
complex mental processes of emotional life, showing that the thought/
emotion dichotomy is oversimplified and misleading. Put simply, neuro
science seems to be learning that emotions are thoughtful (cognitive, not
merely reactive), that all thought is emotional, and that both arise from
similar, physically embodied processes in which emotions are essential
to all supposedly higher mental functions like abstract thought.29 These
four factors combine to argue for a continued rethinking of emotions
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Conclusion 403
as they influence all facets of society, but they are particularly relevant to
social movements, given movements’ often quite dynamic and strategic
use of emotionality. In this work, there is of course a danger that emo-
tions as a movement force will be treated reductively or instrumental-
ized, as opposed to being treated in their full complexity. And in this
approach there will always be a (creative) tension between individual-
izing and structural approaches to emotions.
We can link emotions to what Raymond Williams calls structures
of feeling.30 Williams argues that our supposedly subjective emotions
are as collectively structured as other aspects of our social life, that those
structures differ in relation to a host of social factors (age, gender, race/
ethnicity, and so on), and that they change historically. They also of
course range immensely across ethno-national culture borders. Move-
ments themselves have been one key force in reshaping emotions in ways
that bring about new sensibilities, new structures of feeling that, like
other aspects of movement cultures, spread out into the wider world in
a variety of ways.
While no doubt in danger of being read reductively, my reference
to movements’ mobilization of emotions above is meant to counter the
notion that emotions are somehow beyond our control, something that
we undergo rather than direct, as both narrow rational actor theories
and reductive forms of discourse analysis can sometimes suggest. That
we are not in full conscious control of our emotions is of course true,
since much of our emotional life takes place via subconscious processes
we can never fully know or consciously direct (neuroscientists discuss
“feelings” as the way we become partly conscious of these complex affec-
tive processes). But because emotions are inherently thought-filled, and
because we are highly self-conscious creatures (in a positive sense), we
can learn to shape our emotions to a considerable degree as individuals,
and movements can do so as well. When the Women’s Pentagon Action
scripted its protest into four sections, each built around a dominant affec-
tive context—“Mourning,” “Rage,” “Empowerment,” and “Defiance”—
it gave a particularly clear example of how a movement can learn to chan-
nel emotions in positive and affective (in the larger sense) ways. This
case is particularly illustrative, since it precisely names a process that turns
an inchoate and potentially destructive feeling (rage) into a directed,
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404 Conclusion
pointed action (defiance). (It is no accident that this was a women-only

demonstration, since in our cultural context, while historically coded as
too emotional, women in fact generally are socialized far better than men
in how to understand and use emotionality.) Some degree of this process
of learning to use, rather than only being used by, the deep emotions
that are often the original catalyst for someone to join a movement can
play a key role in sustaining a movement and making it successful. And
the arts offer one of the most profound forces for understanding affect
that humans have developed.
SOME ROLES PLAYED BY THE

ARTS IN MOVEMENT CULTURES
As I have tried to show throughout this book, the arts and related cul-
tural forms function within and around movement cultures, and in re-
lation to the wider culture that movements seek to influence, in a wide
range of ways. The set of movement-related texts that can be labeled
“artistic” represent many different forms, from the ephemeral to the
profound. The various roles listed below are biased toward the narrowly
functional end of the spectrum of what the arts do in movement cul-
tures, but in the subsequent commentary I suggest something of the
vital, less immediate dimensions of movement culture texts. I offer ten
primary roles here, but I am sure there are others I have not thought of.
Sometimes these roles work independently, but more often they over-
lap and interact in various configurations within any given movement
culture.
• Encourage. Help individuals to feel the strength of the group.

Singing in mass rallies can move a person out of the individual self
to feel that strength.
• Empower. Help individuals to feel their own strength. Responsibil-
ity for performing a movement text (say, taking part in the paint-
ing of a mural) can empower an individual to feel his or her own
particular commitment more deeply.
• Harmonize. Smooth differences among diverse constituencies.
Cultural forms can sometimes cut across lines of age, class, region,
even ideology, providing a sense of overarching connection that, at
least for a time, subordinates differences.
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Conclusion 405
• Inform internally. Express or reinforce movement values, ideas,

and tactics. Movement cultural texts provide information in com-
pact, often highly memorable and emotionally charged ways, both
to educate new recruits and to refocus veterans.
• Inform externally. Express movement values, ideas, and tactics to
potential recruits, opponents, and undecided bystanders. Move-
ment cultural texts can often be effective and affective means of
promoting movement ideas to people outside the movement. This
can take place either directly in the moment of action (through a
chant or song) or in more indirect form, such as the formation of
a traveling movement culture group (like SNCC’s Freedom Sing-
ers or the feminist art movement’s Guerrilla Girls).
• Enact movement goals. Create art that actively intervenes directly to
achieve movement values. This might take the form of creating
ecoactive art that helps restore an ecosystem or painting a mural
that improves the appearance of a neighborhood.
• Historicize. Invent, tell, and retell the history of the movement.
This might range from writing and sharing songs like “The Ballad
of the Sit-Ins” to self-producing a documentary about an action,
like Indymedia’s This Is What Democracy Looks Like: The Battle of
Seattle.
• Transform affect or tactics. Set a new emotional tone (for example,
diffuse tension from anger to focused resistance, or from fear to
calm resolve) or redirect the attention of the group (use a song or
a giant puppet to signal a new stage of a demonstration).
• Critique movement ideology. Challenge dominant ideas, values, and
tactics or undercut tendencies toward dogma by evoking emotions
and meanings not reducible to narrowly ideological terms.
• Make room for pleasure. Provide respite from the rigors of move-
ment work through aesthetic joy.
While most of these roles for the arts should be easy to grasp, the
last two, related roles—the contra-ideological and the purely pleasur
able—may need explication. In using the term role in this context, I
know that I risk implying a narrowly instrumentalist, functionalist,
reading. On the one hand, I welcome this because I wish to counter the
idea that the arts are merely added on to more important movement
work. Not only a strand of movement theorists but also some hard-nosed
critics inside movements are often impatient with aspects of movement
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406 Conclusion
cultures they see as “merely expressive”—that is, without any direct rel-
evance to the “real struggle” at hand. This tendency often manifests
itself as the insistence that all participants behave at all times in a manner
consistent with movement goals and values. In movement practice, this
can evolve into a rigid kind of political correctness that will eventually
end up in a perfect movement of one person. Within social movement
theory, this approach has largely been rejected as naive instrumentalism—
the reduction of culture to decoration. In trying to counter the decora-
tive, vaguely expressive limit placed by some on the role of the arts, I
do not want to limit myself on the other side to an idea of the arts as
narrowly practical in importance. While many artful texts do play vital,
practical roles in movements, that is not their only function. They can
have key roles to play precisely in undermining the merely functional
and in countering a movement’s own limitations.
Movement growth is often dependent on two things: an openness
that allows novices a space to learn, and veterans a space to escape from,
movement ideology; and a capacity to shift values, strategies, tactics,
and even goals, which can be nurtured by cultural play that undermines
ideological rigidity. Periods of plain pleasure divorced from the context
of struggle can play a vital role in preventing a problem endemic in move-
ments, burnout. Movements can be quite stressful environments, given
the intense emotions that struggling against the dominant culture can
evoke. Pleasurable activities with no discernible connection to activism
can help to relieve that stress.
At the same time, as is perhaps abundantly clear given the promi-
nent role that political satire has been playing in U.S. politics in recent
years through The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Full Frontal, This Week
Tonight, Saturday Night Live, and other politically engaged entertain-
ment shows, subversive humor can sometimes provide relief from the
stresses of activism while also offering significant political education.31
While some hard-core types dismiss humor as unserious, I take the oppo-
site view: no one lacking a sense of humor should be taken seriously.
Humor can also play a key role in the dimension that I call coun-
terideological, which includes not only direct attack on limited ideas
in movements but also that broader aesthetic capacity (noted above) to
give voice to a fuller complexity of lived experience, a greater depth and
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Conclusion 407
breadth of being than can be conveyed in slogans, manifestos, or any of

the other vital discourses emerging from the strategic level of movements.
Serious art, even in humorous form, can take us beyond the quotidian
parts of our lives within movement cultures and beyond them.
I want to underscore a key factor in the roles played by the arts
in movements suggested by some items on the above list, a factor that
might be called the social relations of cultural production. In his excellent
book Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in
the United States, William Roy points out the limitations of reading
cultural texts without attending to the social relations in which the texts
are embedded and through which they are interpreted or experienced.
In contrasting the role of music in the old left’s People’s Songs movement
of the 1930s with the way music worked in the Civil Rights movement,
he reinforces my argument in the first chapter of this book that music is
most effective when deeply rooted in social interactions and relations, as
opposed to when a singer performs for a passive audience. Roy’s argu-
ment that there is a big difference between being part of an audience for
cultural texts and being a participant in the creation/sharing of those
texts is illustrated in every chapter of The Art of Protest. Think not only
of the group singing in the Civil Rights movement but also of the col-
lectives that created murals in the Chicano/a/x movement, the various
art-based affinity groups in ACT UP, and the guilds in Occupy. This is
not to downplay the importance of cultural texts aimed at audiences
outside a movement, but works of culture created collectively within a
movement are often even more crucial. These social relations of cultural
production are a large part of how culture works in movement contexts
above and beyond the specific functions cited in my list.32 To critique a
metaphor often used to disparage parts of movement culture, preaching
to the choir is sometimes not a bad idea. Choir members need to hear
the sermon too. And if they want to teach the wider world to sing, they
need to know the meanings behind their songs well.
As should be clear from my title onward, I have centered this
book’s analysis on the arts as key elements of movements, and obviously
I believe that the arts play a crucial role in shaping movement cultures.
This is true not just for the allegedly snowflake-ridden left but for right-
wing movements as well. The neofascist white power movement, for
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408 Conclusion
example, has a very elaborated music culture that plays a significant role
in recruitment and indoctrination of members.33 But the arts are only
one element making up the cultural universe of movements, and all of
the functions cited above can be applied as well to other not formally
aesthetic elements of movements. While I have used examples from
the arts to illustrate roles above, these roles can also be thought of more
generally as roles played by the wider range of cultural activities in
movements beyond the more specialized aesthetic variety.
In the realm of verbal expression, for example, it is important to
note that works of verbal art sit somewhere along a spectrum in move-
ments from individual slogans, chants, and memes to media statements
to manifestos expressing full-fledged ideological elaborations. Likewise,
with regard to the spectrum of dramatic enactments in movements,
elaborately staged works of theater or performance art exist alongside
more everyday rituals (such as the chanting of slogans) and gestures
(like idiosyncratic hand signals in meetings) as well as ritualized acts
of civil disobedience (like sit-ins). And, of course, marches and rallies
are ritualized activities that play vital roles in group cultural cohesion,
as well as in signaling the wider culture. When opponents claim that
mass arrests and other events are “staged,” they are not wrong, but they
precisely miss the point. Staged activities can, of course, function both
for the sake of internal solidarity and as ways to symbolically deepen
the movement’s engagement with wider publics. In an unfortunately
inelegant acronym (WUNC), the great movement historian and theo-
rist Charles Tilly succinctly named four central elements of move-
ment messaging in large-scale public displays: worth, unity, numbers,
and commitment. These elements nicely summarize the point of much
movement theatricality broadly construed.34 My argument includes the
notion that the more movements can understand their own perfor-
mance as performance, the more they can achieve a certain degree of
aesthetic distance, the more successful they are likely to become. Part
of my argument about the Black Panthers (in chapter 2) is that if they
had developed a more complete aesthetic understanding of their real-
life performances, they might have had greater impact and not become
trapped in their own dramatic story lines. Put more generally, some-
times real art can teach greater artfulness in the larger sense of thought-
ful strategies.
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Conclusion 409
MOVEMENTS IN CULTURE
By movements in culture, I mean the processes by which movements
emerge from and return to broader cultural contexts. I have noted some
of the ways this happens in previous sections, so here I want to pull some
of those notions together and add some new ones. As I have suggested,
movements emerge out of given general sets of cultural contexts and
then evolve specific sets of cultural features (movement cultures). As
a third step, they often diffuse (circulate, spread) novel moral values,
behaviors, styles, ideas, material objects, social practices, and identities
back into the wider culture.35 Even among the most conservative “con-
sensus movements” (like Mothers Against Drunk Driving), the very act
of stepping outside conventional politics to express a grievance opens
up possibilities for re-viewing the wider culture. As we move across the
spectrum toward ever more deeply oppositional or radical movements,
that re-viewing and questioning process grows more intensive and ex-
tensive. Over the course of a movement and in its aftermath, elements
of the movement culture are diffused (spread) back into the wider cul-
ture in a number of ways. One prominent scholar, Marco Giugni, goes
so far as to suggest that “it is perhaps precisely in being able to alter their
broader cultural environment that movements can have their deepest
and lasting impact.”36 Another influential figure in movement scholar-
ship, Doug McAdam, seems to agree and suggests a key reason: “Given
the entrenched political and economic opposition movements are likely
to encounter, it is often true that their biggest impact is more cultural
than narrowly political and economic.”37
This diffusion of movement culture back into mainstream culture
can indeed be the most important impact a given movement may have.
Yet it is among the least studied aspects of movements, and it is not dif-
ficult to see why. Culture is a messy business; it is clearly a less easily
measured object of analysis than Supreme Court rulings, legislation, or
income patterns. But for social scientists to ignore a whole terrain and
its impact just because it is not easily quantifiable seems, well, highly
unscientific. One key reason culture may be a more fruitful avenue for
change than politics or economics is that cultural institutions tend to be
relatively more open and less defensive than these other realms. Indeed,
since at least the rise of modernism in the arts, innovation has been
an imperative in much cultural production. Particularly since the early
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410 Conclusion
twentieth century (with its proliferation of isms—symbolism, Dada-

ism, surrealism, futurism, and so on), this has meant a very active search
for new cultural forms that, in addition to opening up alternative visions,
has sometimes contributed directly to creativity in social movements.
That is why cultural formations have so often aligned with movements.
At the same time, culturally disruptive aesthetic movements can be
co-opted through a process of cultural appropriation that cuts out the
politically disruptive elements (as, for example, when punk was divorced
from its rebellious working-class origins and turned into a fashion state-
ment for elites who wore safety pins in their earlobes alongside their
diamond earrings).
The impact of a given movement culture on the putative cul-
tural mainstream is often obscured, because the mainstream, at least in
a democratic society, by definition positions itself as flexible, open but
stable, a system that changes without the need for disruptive movement
activity. As I have suggested in several chapters, movements almost never
get much credit for the political, social, and cultural changes they help
bring about. And when they see such changes, they often dismiss them
as co-optation because the changes never amount to the full transfor-
mation the movements desire. The changes are almost always highly
mediated, indirect. And when they are direct, they tend to be superfi-
cial, since often only those movement forms and norms that are seen as
nonthreatening are openly adopted (as when, for example, Black Power
cultural forms were reduced to Afro hairstyles and a preference for
pseudo-African dashiki dress styles). Nevertheless, even these defusing
(power-lessening) appropriations often carry with them supplemental
elements of the more politically charged contexts in which they initially
appeared (a white kid’s initially superficial musical interest in rap might
just spark a deeper political understanding of racism).
Perhaps the clearest examples of these processes arise from con-
temporary women’s movements. Anyone comparing gender norms in
the 1950s with those in the twenty-first century would see an immense
change at every possible level. The impact of feminism, significant as
it has been on legislation and on formal institutions, is still greater at the
level of personal interaction. Most of the differences in gender norms
between the 1950s and today bear the imprint of feminist ideas. Yet
only a very small proportion of the individuals affected by those changes
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Conclusion 411
would call themselves feminists or ever had direct contact with a wom-
en’s movement group. A widely used women’s studies classroom experi-
ment reveals how this process manifests itself. The professor writes on
the board a list of women’s movement issues: equal pay for equal work,
equity in sports access, right to reproductive freedom, equality in male–
female personal relations, better rape prevention and victims’ rights,
and so on. The instructor then asks who in the class supports each of
these items. In most classrooms, even in relatively conservative com-
munities, the response to virtually all the items is one of overwhelming
support. Then the professor asks the next question: How many of the
students in the class are feminists? The hands raised, even in relatively
liberal communities, are usually very, very few. Every one of the issues
listed emerged out of feminist social movement struggle, yet virtually
no one among those supporting the issues identifies with the movement
that put them forth.
This story illustrates what I call the paradox of diffusion and defu-
sion. The ideas of the women’s movement have been diffused with strik-
ing success out into the wider culture, but they have been detached
from their movement origins (and, in varying degrees, defused from
their most challenging forms). Just as it is axiomatic that movements
seldom get credit for changes they force upon government and nongov-
ernment institutions, it is axiomatic that changes in norms initiated by
social movement activity pass through enough levels of mediation to
make the origins of those changes invisible. The underlying reason is
the same in both cases: most institutions, whether political or cultural,
are invested in their own stability, while movements thrive on engen-
dering instability.
Movement cultures are diffused into the wider culture on several
different levels, reflecting the layers of culture within movements them-
selves. In the broadest sense, we can talk about culture being diffused
through folk culture (as was the case with some Civil Rights music), pop-
ular culture (as in the case of rock music’s relation to the anti-apartheid
movement of the 1980s, discussed in chapter 6), and/or high culture (as
in the case of the profusion of feminist-inflected poetry, detailed in
chapter 4).
So, the central paradox is that the energies of radical movement
cultures and the cultural forms they generate have their greatest impact
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412 Conclusion
when they are diffused in a less overtly ideological way into the larger
social arena via cultural movements. But that impact can be largely defused
(can lose its power to explode dominant ideas) unless self-consciously
ideological social movements continue their work.38 This ongoing, irre-
solvable, creative tension between defusion and diffusion can be a key
point of study for the cultural analysis of movements. Movement cul-
tures are partly implicated in, not wholly immune to, these processes
of appropriation, co-optation, and defusion. But, as many chapters of
this book have shown, they are also one of the primary means of resist-
ing the forces that would reduce all culture to economic exchange in the
course of instantiating a tragically unequal and unjust globalized capi-
talist system.
As the new media struggle around the Battle of Seattle (discussed
in chapter 9) and the Occupy movement (in chapter 10) illustrate par-
ticularly well, the diffusing and defusing of movement texts entails an
increasingly intricate dance involving mainstream media, social media,
and various forms of alternative media in and around movements. The
increasing speed and intensity of processes that commodify or other-
wise appropriate dissent has complicated the articulation of cultural
politics and alternative political cultures. Given these tendencies, it seems
crucial to understand more fully the processes by which movements
help create contexts of cultural reception and produce alternative cul-
tures that can better resist co-optation.
While it is important to be as precise as possible in characterizing
the impacts of culture on movements and movements on culture, we
should not let a supposed “rigor” often bordering on rigor mortis under-
play the most significant impacts of movements. Sometimes movement
cultures are most effectively diffused into the wider society through a
general transgression of cultural codes. Swidler puts it this way: “Even
without conscious efforts at publicity, one of the most important effects
social movements have is publicly enacting images that confound exist-
ing cultural codings. From the punk subculture’s deliberate embrace of
‘ugly’ styles . . . to the Black Panthers’ display of militant, disciplined,
armed black revolutionaries to the New Left spectacle of middle-class
college students being beaten by the police . . . altering cultural codings
is one of the most powerful ways social movements actually bring about
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Conclusion 413
change.”39 While the particulars of each of these cultural code transgres-

sions matter, there is also a more general level on which the extrainstitu
tional nature of movements and the disruptive nature of their practices
constitute an ongoing message that the status quo is open to change.
Nevertheless, such messages are usually far more potent when embed-
ded in movements explicitly calling for sociopolitical change.
Several theorists have suggested that the impacts of certain move-
ments can at times come less from the particular grievances or issue con
cerns they diffuse into the wider society than from a more general set of
processes labeled “prefiguration,” “symbolic action,” “direct theory,” and
“social texts” that speak beyond their particular issues. All movements,
even the most consensus-oriented ones in societies that legitimate cer-
tain kinds of protest, offer some degree of symbolic challenge to the dom
inant order just by their existence outside normalized political activity.
But clearly the degree and kind of symbolic challenges offered by par-
ticular movements vary immensely. Wini Breines has analyzed, for ex-
ample, how the “prefigurative politics” of the New Left of the 1960s
was embodied in the movement culture as it attempted to enact within
itself the radically different values and forms it sought to create through-
out the wider world.40 By “prefigurative,” Breines means a symbolic
enactment of a wider vision of a radically changed society. Francesca
Polletta has further elaborated the study of prefigurative elements in
movements as an integral part of their work, especially the ways in
which the decision-making practices of some movements are meant as
a challenge to the limits of supposedly democratic political systems.41
In a related vein, movement scholar Noël Sturgeon has offered a deep
semiotic reading of the organizational structures (like small-scale affinity
groups and consensus process) of the antinuclear direct-action movement
of the 1980s. She argues that movement structures not only expressed
movement values but also embodied the movement’s theories about social
change. Sturgeon offers the term direct theory to characterize the way in
which the movement’s organizational form embodied a point-by-point
theoretical and symbolic alternative to the dominant order’s notions of
legitimate power.42 Italian movement theorist Alberto Melucci has writ-
ten of the “symbolic challenge of movements,” in which movement cul-
tural codes counter the cultural codes of the dominant society through
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414 Conclusion
sometimes direct, sometimes indirect semiotic warfare that goes beyond

the particular issues on which the movements are focused.43 In my own
earlier work Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers, I have argued that move-
ments both create new “social texts” and are themselves “texts.” A move-
ment is at once a site from which particular alternative stories about the
culture emerge and a kind of metanarrative about an alternative way
to live in the wider world.44 Though differing in emphasis and case
study examples, all these theorists have shown how movement cultures
become messages of resistance and embodiments of alternative social
arrangements that resonate beyond their core issues.
HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS
Much of the most important cultural action in movements occurs on
that notoriously fuzzy terrain called consciousness. Movements gener-
ate new ways of thinking, new ways of being, new norms of behavior,
new styles of living (as opposed to mere “lifestyles”), all of which con-
tain an element of what has historically been classified as the “subjective.”
Some of these new ways of being are eventually expressed in the formal
political realm of parties, elections, legal decisions, and legislation, but
more often they are embodied in indirect ways for which movements
seldom get the credit (from the society at large or from scholars of move-
ments). Beneath the more studied level of formal ideologies, or even
elaborated cognitive “frames,” are levels of often contradictory but always
socially meaningful layers of consciousness that neither empiricists nor
historical materialists and social constructionists are very comfortable
with. One need not devolve back to a naive notion of individualism
to understand that socially constructed subjective experience is embod-
ied variably in particular persons even when those persons are subject to
broad social-discursive patterns.
To leave these dimensions unexplored is to do damage, even vio-
lence, to movements and to the deeply aggrieved lives out of which
movements often arise. Recent social and cultural theories have given us
better tools to challenge simplistic dichotomies between objective and
subjective, the materialist and the idealist. The meaning-making pro-
cesses of culture are neither independent of nor narrowly dependent
upon material conditions. In not taking seriously qualities like pride,
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Conclusion 415
dignity, hope, faith, self-esteem, and related elements of consciousness,

or reducing them to “merely” psychological or subjective factors, we may
miss key dimensions of a movement’s impact. We may also rob subor-
dinated groups of one of their most valuable resources—their ability to
see themselves differently from how they are seen by their oppressors.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is in relation to the most ex-
treme cases of material deprivation. In Domination and the Arts of Resis-
tance, James C. Scott demonstrates convincingly that even in the most
extreme conditions of deprivation and unfreedom—slavery, serfdom, in-
dentured servitude, rigid caste cultures, concentration camps, prisons—
people have shown an amazing capacity to control their consciousness
and resist the imposition of dominant views. Scott shows, moreover,
that the “hidden transcripts” in which this resistance is concealed often
take a cultural form, as folktales, songs, jokes, and theater.45 These hid-
den transcripts should be respected on their own terms as carved-out
bits of subjective but no less real freedom. They also should be attended
to by activists and scholars alike as potential sites for the emergence of
unhidden resistance in movement form.
Surely we do a disservice to movement actors when we fail to
acknowledge that part of their experience takes the form of putatively
“merely subjective” transformations not easily visible in external struc-
tures or behaviors. Not only is it possible to talk about a more (or less)
subjectively free member of an oppressed group, but it is also often
essential to do so if we are to understand how change happens (or fails
to happen). Pride, dignity, self-worth arise through struggle even when
particular goals may not be met. A change in the inner transcript can be
as important as a change in policy, law, or economic circumstance.
Movement activists and analysts should be encouraged to become
skilled not only in interpreting explicit movement culture texts but also
in getting at the “hidden transcripts” in the interstices of cultural docu-
ments. These are not individual experiences but “structures of feeling”
every bit as efficacious as political or economic structures.46 The “free-
dom high” experienced by many activists working in the southern Civil
Rights struggle, for example, proved to be a materially important force
in propelling the movement forward. But at less intense levels, move-
ment actors and even those who experience a movement at a distance
can have their conscious and subconscious experience of themselves and
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416 Conclusion
the world altered profoundly in ways that are never translated into
overt, visible actions. An elderly “Negro” who watched with deep pride
those Black Panthers marching on the seat of state power in Sacramento
in 1968, or, decades later, an older black woman who watched as Black
Lives Matter activists protested police brutality—neither may have ever
joined a movement, but the lives of both were changed for the better
through an enhanced sense of self-worth.
At the same time, any argument that so-called subjective factors
have become more important than ever in our putative “information
age” must be made with caution. Without that caution, we get state-
ments like this: “In the contemporary context, we can define exploita-
tion as a form of dependent participation in the information flow, as
the deprivation of control over the construction of meaning. The true
exploitation is not the deprivation of information; even in the shanty-
towns of the cities of the Third World people are today widely exposed
to the media, only they do not have any power to organize this informa-
tion according to their own needs. Thus, the real domination is today
the exclusion from the power of naming.”47 This is hyperbole bordering
on nonsense. The “real” power is the power of naming? This takes the
now self-evident insight that cultural coding is important and turns it
into a claim that cultural coding is the only important power. The mate-
rial conditions of those shantytowns are unimportant? Does the lack of
hygiene and nutrition, or the opportunity to go to school or the mate-
rial quality of schools, play no role in the conditions in which power is
organized? This particular kind of analysis does great disservice to the
power of serious discourse analysis, and to the important task of respect-
ing the lived experience of marginalized peoples.
BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT

Reading social movement theory, I am sometimes reminded of the Sufi
tale of “The Visually Challenged Persons and the Pachyderm” (aka “The
Blind Men and the Elephant”). My revisionist version would go some-
thing like this: Once upon a time, a group of social movement theorists
went on a safari together. Their search took them out on a dark, moon-
less night, and they spread out across the jungle. When they returned to
camp, each had encountered an elephant, and all were eager to report
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Conclusion 417
their findings. The first to speak was a collective behaviorist. He had heard
an elephant charging through the jungle and, after having nearly been
trampled, declared that elephants are dangerous, anarchic things, prone
to rioting and mob actions. The next safarist, a resource mobilization
theorist, walked right into the side of a sleeping elephant. She declared
the creature to be a solid, well-organized thing, rather like a carefully
built wall. A third theorist, from the political process camp, followed an
elephant as it moved about its habitat, and declared that the most inter-
esting thing about elephants is how their behavior is determined by the
shifting opportunities for food found in their part of the jungle. Another
theorist, a fanciful thinker from the social constructionist school, became
fascinated by the elephant’s large, fanlike ears. She opined that elephant
ears function rather like satellite dishes, taking in information about the
jungle, processing it in uniquely elephantine ways, then transmitting
it anew into the wider jungle. Throughout these reports, one theorist,
of the historical materialist persuasion, was looking mildly perturbed.
When his turn came, he declared it self-evident that the elephant’s large,
tree-trunk-like legs are the foundation on which all other elements
of elephantness ultimately depend. Finally, a social movement theorist
focused on the arts spoke, eloquently describing the loud but lovely
trumpet sounds emanating from the elephant’s trunk. This theorist felt
certain of having begun to decipher the most important aspect of the
elephant, declaring that in essence elephants are singers, artfully shaping
the jungle purely through the power and beauty of their song. Clearly,
those tree-trunk legs, the massive torso, satellite-dish ears, and unpre-
dictably whiplike tail are merely secondary enablers of the performance.
Meanwhile, as daylight broke, a whole herd of elephants walked by
unnoticed as the scholars debated their respective theories.
My revision of the famous Sufi allegory is meant to acknowledge
succinctly some of the rich body of work done on movements over the
past half century. But it is also a cautionary tale about the beastly com-
plexity of movements, suggesting that no one will ever capture one (alive)
for their particular, private movement zoo. The Sufi tale, in my reading,
is not a call for a total theory of elephants (or movements) but rather a
call to respect the integrity of the creature and to recognize the inevita-
ble partialness of perspective. Likewise, the summary I have offered in
this essay is not meant to add up to a total theory of movements, or
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418 Conclusion
even of the role of the arts in movements. In my view, the great variety
of movements, and the differing conditions in which they arise and
evolve, makes any attempt to find their essence both futile and danger-
ous. The danger lies both in misunderstanding the complex, varied
dynamics of movements and in inadvertently missing (or indirectly sti-
fling) the creativity of movements, missing their ability to shape-shift in
response to new conditions.
In this brief overview essay, I have tried to give some sense of the
complicated forces that surround and work through social movements. I
have stressed cultural factors in this summary because until recently they
have been less emphasized, and because I use art as the focus to intro-
duce the ten movements I discuss in this book. But in each chapter I have
tried to show that the other forces that have more often been studied in
relation to movements—organizational patterns, political processes, eco
nomic resources, leadership styles, and so on—are also extremely impor-
tant. These are crucial aspects of movements and must remain part of any
full agenda for analyzing movements. In these reflections, I have noted
a number of ways in which recent cultural theory has argued that social,
economic, and political forces cannot be understood apart from the
cultural processes through which they take on meaning. These divisions
themselves—social, economic, political, cultural—are, after all, socially
constructed, cultural concepts, not real things neatly dividing the world.
Given the focus of this book, I have concentrated on some of the many
ways that artistic and cultural texts, among other material-discursive prac-
tices, have played and continue to play important roles in movements.
My goal has not been to argue for these particular forms as more impor-
tant than other forces and discourses, but rather to see them as one cru-
cial part of this larger set of factors. Material-discursive means precisely
that political economy, organizational structures, social institutions, and
other forces are always intertwined with even the most seemingly ethe-
real forms of discourses. In suggesting something of the wide range of
relevant theory and method that can help us better understand move-
ments, I hope to encourage anyone interested in these issues to use my
endnotes and the companion website to delve more deeply into what I
could only touch upon here in quick, abstract outline.
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University of Minnesota Press

Chapter Title: CONCLUSION: THE CULTURAL STUDY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Book Title: The Art of Protest

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not only of reductively shoehorning differing types of movements into

SCHOOLS OF MOVEMENT ANALYSIS

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and consciousness-­related dimensions of movements, which they often

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seek to realign existing cultural frames so as to create a picture of their

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approaches focus on languages as systems that use us as much as we use

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While, like my brief descriptions of schools of movement analysis above,

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positions that they believe to be underrepresented or not represented at

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LGBTQ movements insist that the “personal is political,” that private

THE FIELD(S) OF POWER

Much confusion about the political dimension of social move-

Buechler is here trying to balance more traditional notions of power

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imperative when the movement being examined is a complexly coali-

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ACT UP “saved” that group from the irrelevance of a cultural politics by

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variants of the same elements that make up any cultural group—­shared

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particularly when they have emerged in the dynamic context of a move-

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as complementary. At other times, organizational difficulties can tear a

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facilitate recruitment into more directly political movements. As I have

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respect cultural differences and differences in historical context in their

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CULTURAL FORMATIONS, AESTHETIC IDEOLOGIES,

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cultures, they may consider their first concerns to be aesthetic or aca-

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The case of hip-­hop can likewise illustrate something of the com-

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a significant new dimension to movements’ media portrayals, with both

DEGREES OF MOVEMENT CULTURE ELABORATION

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adversely affected in its search for the broadest possible constituency

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pointed action (defiance). (It is no accident that this was a women-­only

SOME ROLES PLAYED BY THE

• Encourage. Help individuals to feel the strength of the group.

and consciousness-related dimensions of movements, which they often

variants of the same elements that make up any cultural group—shared

The case of hip-hop can likewise illustrate something of the com-

pointed action (defiance). (It is no accident that this was a women-only

twentieth century (with its proliferation of isms—symbolism, Dada-

dignity, hope, faith, self-esteem, and related elements of consciousness,