Political protest and affective practice: emotions and power in action

Modern liberal democratic societies have been fundamentally shaped by historical social movements, protests, and civic resistance. Utilising Foucault’s ‘triangle’ of powers – sovereign, disciplinary, biopower – as its theoretical framework, this thesis seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the ‘affective practices’ of protesters in Newcastle, NSW. Normative governmental mentalities, a component and expression of the state, authorise and permit protests and political resistance as part of the liberalism of governing. Protest participants have an uneasy relationship with these expressions of sovereign power and resist in ‘productive’ ways, predominantly through reverse discourses – speechifying, sign-making, collective chanting and marching. Resistance is deeply rooted in an emotional investment in social and environmental issues and performed on the public stage through mass demonstrations, marches and vigils. Such sites of struggle have highly charged affective atmospheres. The influence of friends, kin, and ‘protest colleagues’ is essential in establishing the tone and shape of such affective atmospheres, whether they be edgy, funereal or carnivalesque. Participation is partly a result of feelings of disquiet and frustration which require catharsis and partly a result of previous affective protest experiences. Identifying as protesting subjects, respondents have feelings of moral superiority, of being ‘right, and uncritically so’ that are expressed with a sophisticated understanding of the subjectivity of moral reasoning. Motivations for protest attendance can also be connected to respondents’ desire to produce more protesting subjects in their peers and acquaintances, irrespective of protest cause. Finally, protesters in Australia are almost always in geospatial contestation with the police during their protesting activities yet are rarely in control of protest spaces. Indeed, it is the police, the disciplinary arm of the sovereign state, from whom protesters must seek permission and authority to temporarily occupy public spaces and perform their grievances. Any transgression from pre-agreed and permitted activities is civilly penalised and reinforced with the threat of state-sanctioned violence. Using qualitative interviewing and ethnographic observation, this thesis analyses the relations between individual everyday emotions and governmental powers, asking to what extent do authorised protests challenge the self-governing discipline that Foucault describes?