Responses to TQW Winter School
Social Protesting by Marcel J. V. Kieslich
With every political movement, new images emerge that occupy local and global spaces. Protest is an experimental form of resistance, a public manifestation of speculative gestures. In activism, protesting bodies move ‘against the business as usual’. They walk on fields where they were not expected. Blind spots are exposed. But what is the role of sociability in this? Primarily gestures of respect publicise intimacy. Holding hands is such a policy of affection that demonstrates the social by opening – only open hands can hold one another. With this posture own boundaries are being transcended. ‘Protesting the Social’ undermines the human hybris. Instead of looking up, holding hands reach to the side and clear the way for others.
In everyday life, they reach for tools. They write and raise their voices when someone speaks. They paint invisible pictures in the air while people tell and discuss. They disguise while remaining naked themselves. What language do they speak? They make – noise; are loud: the voices of the voiceless. They bear witness to con-tact by putting rhythms into the world. ‘The left comes from the heart.’ But what role does this binarity play when they are handed unvarnished to strangers to be held?
Open palms create oneness. Holding without ownership for a culture that cannot be alienated. By holding hands, hands become harbours that give and take without intervening and holding on. Emptying is a self-determined form of potentisation, whereas empty harbours remain economically alienated. Demonstrative handholding avoids capitalist gestures. United hands are unusual, ethic-aesthetic gestures that resist asocial power structures; a nonverbal practice that is opposed to fights; a nonviolent confrontation that shows solidarity with one another.
The individual fingerprint no longer matters when we hold each other. The holding movement is a political castration tool against structures that limit us. We must lay down weapons of action and want nothing but benevolence if togetherness shall succeed.
Gestures of intervening by Martina Fladerer & Anna Maria Stadler
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