‘Performing’ Protest: The Mass Media as Stage

Contemporary citizen activism, especially street protests and demonstrations, can hardly be imagined without the mass media to amplify and sustain its message as well as mobilize a following and encourage support. The attendance of news media at the site of protest campaigns also exerts a powerful influence on their overall functioning and management and particularly on the ‘performance’ of protestors. Using empirical data from Jamaica and drawing on aspects of Douglas Kellner’s (2003) work on media spectacle, I explore this acute interdependence between popular protest and popular media; the varied and multiple ways to which the news media, particularly television, is integral to the performance of protest, how protestors manoeuvre themselves, and deploy spectacle to secure their interests within the media spotlight. Conversely, I explore the media’s coverage and treatment of protest and protestors and what impact, if any, this may have on how protestors are driven to ‘perform’ them.

‘…a [it is] poor people press conference’. 

This is how a former media colleague once described street protests and demonstrations in Jamaica. The remark was meant as a comedic reference to the extraordinary frequency of citizen protest (some 200-300 roadblock-demonstrations annually) and the regularity with which the news media lend it coverage. The description is an intriguing one because, as my colleague continued, ‘the media is where a forum is established which allows poor people to speak and be heard’. Given the economic and political powerlessness of disadvantaged classes and their historical exclusion from the ‘bourgeois’ public sphere, there are few opportunities for announcing grievances or making demands on the system. Direct popular citizen action, including roadblocks and placard-bearing street protests, are, very often, the only chance for the poor to come into contact with the power of the media. And popular protest, as broadcast by the news media, is often the only means through which political representatives and other bureaucrats are alerted to the concerns of their constituents. The quest to influence the authorities has thus resulted in the mass media gaining prominence in Jamaica, as elsewhere, within the context of newer and more dynamic modes of action and self-expression.  

 Indeed, it is becoming decidedly impossible to analyse and make sense of the dynamics of popular protest without systematic attention to its utilization of and relationship with media. The theoretical and political intersection between popular protest and the media is embedded in as much in the way the news media cover protests and portray protestors as the extent to which protestors are becoming active participants and performers in the stories told about them. Within the context of the inherent power of the media to (positively or negatively) shape perceptions, I focus on how protestors, especially those from the disadvantaged classes, exploit this media opportunity to make public their concerns. For example, within the protestor–media nexus, whose ends are being served and how? Are protestors, in other words, obliged to concern themselves with how they are portrayed and similarly with how they represent themselves within media? If so, how do they direct and manage their protest performance to attract maximum media coverage? What kinds of discursive resources and political techniques do they deploy to disseminate their political message? In turn, how do the media produce and reproduce these discourses and performances and to what extent might the protestors’ goals and interests be compromised in this process?

 These are vital questions, which illuminate the increasingly contentious interaction between media gatekeepers and protestors’ politics of (mediated) ‘image’ in contexts such as Jamaica. Responses depend on, first, examining the actions of protestors as they engage in the performance of protest, and, second, the way the news media plays into and becomes subsumed and assimilated in the performance of protest. It is important to also acknowledge as a context the growing impact of media culture, particularly the politics of spectacle, its new and significant entry into domains such as politics, economy, society and everyday life, and the consequent impact of this new development on citizen interaction with media as well as media functioning itself. As a point of departure however, it is essential to outline the reasons popular protest has assumed such importance for Jamaican citizens, how media politics have evolved here, and how the increasing intersection between popular protest and popular media has played out in this postcolonial West Indian society.

 Popular Protest and Media Politics in Jamaica: An Overview

Jamaica’s history is the history of protest. For close to four hundred years, popular protest in all its forms (marches, riots, and demonstrations) has been the official answer of the Afro-Jamaican people to enslavement, colonisation, domination, tyranny, oppression and injustice. This long-continuing resistance movement stretches from the Maroon Wars against the English of the 16^th and 17^th centuries to the massive slave uprisings from 1831 onwards, culminating in emancipation in 1838. Riots and civil disturbances became commonplace even after slaves were freed. According to Simmonds (1983:1), ‘to protest against negative developments and stagnation, Jamaicans assembled and participated in acts of open defiance and violence’. This model of resistance manifested in the violent labour unrest of the 1930s and 1940s, the Black Power movements of the 1960s, (including the Walter Rodney riots of 1968), the violent partisan political upheavals of the 1970s as well as the fuel protests of 1979, all-island strike of 1985, and the Gas riots of 1999.

Since the mid 1990s, deficient delivery of social services – water, proper roads, sewerage, electrification and public transportation – as well as growing concerns over inflationary standards of living and issues of justice embodied in human rights violations (police killings and abuse) regularly drive large numbers of Jamaican citizens onto the streets mounting roadblocks and engaging in disorderly demonstrations. Together these issues are fundamental to basic survival and the quality of life. In the face of widespread perception of state neglect, citizens therefore feel unable to exercise any effective control over the policies of the state and the nature of their socio-economic condition except through vigorous, and many times, violent protest.  These violent strategies are embodied in fiery roadblocks, disruptive street demonstrations and, in extreme cases, arson (burning police vehicles; public and private property), gunfire, mob activity (looting and vandalism) as well as all out and out war between citizens and the police .

 Any assessment of the performance of protest in Jamaica must also take account of the following historical reality: citizen politics in Jamaica resides and operates within the context of a heavily factionalised and highly-charged political culture involving intense political violence and patron-client politics. That this political milieu is so polarised and often violent means that (1) citizen politics, including popular protest, also operate with an intense emotional and often partisan charge, and (2) a range of actors, including the media, becomes implicated in the production of violent politics.  

Recent scholarly work has recognised the importance of the media to democratic participation (Norris, 1997; Clarke 2002; Street, 2001; McGregor & Comrie, 2002; Barber, 1984:166-167; cf. 1998; Putnam, 1995). The utilitarian nature of the mass media underscores its pervasiveness particularly throughout developing countries as tools to enable development, empower citizens, foster education among less literate populations as well as promote democracy and social change.  In the Caribbean island-nation of Jamaica, home to some 2.7 million people, the media have assumed enormous importance. The media, for example, have been central in the evolution of this post-colonial society, playing critical roles in helping to shape its institutions, cultural norms and political values. The news media in modern Jamaica is a corollary to this development. The recognition by Jamaican citizens of the media’s physical and political reach, along with their ongoing struggle vis-à-vis public protestations for the protection of their rights, means that there is effectively a contract between citizens and the mass media. By the terms of this agreement, it might be said that citizens allow the media unrestricted access to their lives in exchange for their capacity to act as ‘political watchdog’ and reach the corridors of power to secure and protect their interests. Citizens also enter into this contract with the media in order to strengthen the relationship between themselves and their government.

The media and their audience clearly need each other, but so often this co-dependent relationship is fraught with problems, as each party tries to manipulate the other to secure their particular interests. It is within this powerful media-citizen negotiated encounter (a mutually constitutive relationship even) that the notions of performance and media spectacle finds relevance. In the full paper, I highlight the importance of seeing protest as a kind of performance by drawing on recent theoretical offerings on performance politics. Using protest politics in Jamaica as a case study, I also examine the possibility and reality of protest as spectacle when media become fully participant. Here is a snapshot of that discussion.

 The Politics of Performance

Performance politics is experiencing a renaissance. So is the production of spectacle. Indeed the two seems locked in a symbiotic relationship in our increasingly mediatised world. Performance has always been given to extravagance and spectacle whereas spectacle depends for its state of being on performance (albeit exaggerated). In his seminal work on the subject, The Triumph of the Spectacle, Kellner (2003:1-2), drawing on the earlier work of Guy Debord, addresses this subject in its totality, particularly its modern reincarnation in contemporary American society. For example, Kellner’s recollection of the spectacles of Ancient Rome and Classical Greece with its open air rhetorical battles, extravagant demonstrations of Gladiator violence, titanic political battles, orgies and triumphant displays of conquest, empire and power (manifested in Hollywood blockbusters such as ‘Troy’; ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Gladiator’) illustrates the pervasive and longstanding presence of spectacle, and also of performance.

 Although these historical examples of performances are contained within a particular sphere, performance and spectacle are nowadays important rituals of negotiating everyday life.  Theatre scholar, Ben Kershaw (1996:6) maintains that the increasing ‘mediatisation of societies disperses the theatrical by inserting performance into everyday life’ (my emphasis).  By this, he means that the very concept of performance is no longer limited to what we call drama or necessarily constrained within the space of the stage/theatre but has managed to extend itself beyond this institutionalized arena to find and occupy place within socio-political domains.

 Kellner (2003:1-2), drawing on the case of America, insists that spectacle is becoming one of the organising principles of the economy, polity, society and everyday life, helped along by the power of media. Social and political conflicts, Kellner (2003) maintains, are increasingly played out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles such as sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life. Kellner (2003:1-2) also calls attention to the centrality of performance in the modern organisation of everyday life by arguing that today’s internet-based economy deploys spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and the circulation and selling of commodities. Media culture, in turn proliferates ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles to seize audiences and increase the media’s power and profit.

 That performance is now less theoretically affixed to a stage and more diffuse into socio-political domains, and that contemporary media culture has deep investments in its revivification also means that the performative quality of power is also becoming more evident. For example, citizens across the world are not only deploying performance politics as part of an armoury of innovative weapons to confront/challenge inequities in the distribution of power in their societies but also capitalising on the media’s attention to the propagation of spectacle as an avenue to make claims upon their governments, and negotiate to secure their interests and demands.

 In a broader vein, however, that offers a particular rethinking of political action, Hannah Arendt (1965:153) declares that politics itself is ‘a performing art’. In this theatrical rendering of politics, the accomplishment is seen to lie in the performance itself as it is in drama, dance or music. In short, the value of performance is prized for its own sake, as something intrinsic to political action itself, not as something extrinsic and thus dependent on outcomes (cf. Torgerson, 2005:510). Is political performance the same? Is the performance embedded in a protest event concerned intrinsically with entertainment/entertaining and not political outcomes? This question is important as theatre is, after all, fundamentally about entertainment. Its purpose (and power) is to get a strong reaction from the audience (see Cole, 1983). Theatre, in this performative, political sense, can therefore be the strongest of weapons but like all weapons, it works both ways – it can produce great benefits as well as become the nesting place for malevolence (ibid, 1983). Performance (of any kind) therefore has goals and outcomes and therefore cannot, as Arendt suggests, be merely intrinsic.

 Arendt’s (1965:154) argument, however, has value. For her, ‘performing artistes need an audience to show their virtuosity and acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their work and both depend upon others for the performance itself’. If popular citizen protest is a performing art, then it is the street which represents a public stage upon which it is performed. The street is, however, not the only platform. There is today an even more powerful political stage – the mass media. It is from this powerful communications arena that Jamaican protestors, for example,  deploy different kinds of performances – block roads with boulders, old cars and debris; create bonfires from burning tires; shout and scream, march with placards, undress and engage the police in gunfire exchanges. Their goal is to reach and address their mass audience, which, more often than not, comprises state actors and various anonymous publics. It is also on this powerful media platform that protest performers encounter the seductive power and spectacle of media culture.

For more on this article, see Johnson, Hume (2008), International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Vol 4 (2), pp 163-182.

Violence – A Costly Strategy for the Poor

Whereas violence carries with it a deep and undeniable logic, I thought I would write about the flip side of this logic. Indeed, the paradopx of violent protest is that whislt disruptive demonstrations, including fiery roadblocks, rigid barricades and burning tyres, are triggered by genuine grievances and injustice and whereas the government’s seemingly ritualized inaction humiliates and angers citizens, the requirement of the poor to survive poverty is not a sufficient explanation for the extremity and destructiveness dominant in the protestation models currently in force in Jamaica. This brand of demand-making rebellion is problematic because (1) genuine citizen mobilizations, when executed in antagonistic ways, run the risk of being hijacked by persons with contradictory or outright criminal intentions, (2) legitimate forces of activism (community groups, student groups; youth movements) will potentially co-opt these so-called ‘weapons of the weak’ and thereby perpetuate the normalization of destructive mobilization and political negotiation tactics rather than advance strategies that can build a truly participatory and functioning civil society, and (3) the deployment of combative protestation styles gives the impression of instability and a departure from the rule of law and hence invites repression by the state in the name of order.

These developments not only serve to alienate possible supporters but instead perpetuate the further marginalization of the marginal sector and undermine the cause and goals for which they protest. An impression is also being formed in the political culture that protest cannot take the form of civil discourse and organized civil action. This is not to say that civility does not allow room for overt acts of resistance or criticism of unjust laws and practices. Indeed, roadblock politics, in certain circumstances for example, to protest against bad road conditions, is sometimes a necessary and positive action. However, from the point of view of civility and civil politics properly understood, fiery roadblocks and other forms of violent protest presume superiority to the rule of law as well as disrespect to others who feel differently or actively object to the action. 

Violence is, in reality, a costly startegy for the poor. Let me reiterate F. Piven & R. Cloward’s (1977) perspective on this issue, as outlined in their seminal book, ‘Poor Peoples’ Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail’ because it finds basis in the Jamaica context. They argue persuasively that the amount of leverage that protestors gain by applying negative sanctions (violent tactics) is dependent on: (a) whether the contribution withheld is crucial to others, (b) whether or not those affected by the disruption have resources to concede and (c) whether the obstructionist group can protect itself adequately from reprisals or consequences. How does this thesis relate to the Jamaican context? First, unlike factory workers or students, marginal sectors such as the unemployed usually operate in non-institutional settings and thereby do not have contributions such as labour to withdraw. In other words, the poor in Jamaica, as elsewhere, cannot strike so their only recourse is usually to riot or block roads in order to create maximum disruption of others. Second, the economic constraints facing the Jamaican state largely determines its capacity to concede resources. Thirdly, in some instances, unless a protest has managed to galvanize the support of powerful groups (politicians, business sector, media etc.), it is very easy for the state to repress or ignore these campaigns and the demands of protestors.

In light of these criteria, it becomes evident that it is the poor who are usually in the least strategic position to benefit from this kind of defiance. Blocking roads, barricading schools, burning and looting, as well as exchanging gunfire with the police are no doubt powerful forms of direct citizen action. However, they impact not just the source of citizens’ discontent (the government) but everyone. Schools are shut, transportation is halted, productivity is diminished and food supply is disrupted. The political reverberations are enormous. This may of course force the state to act but the disadvantage appears to fall more to the protestor and less so to the state and other powerful interests.

I am not here objecting to protests and the need for citizens with genuine concerns to mount protests, or calling for a halt to the democratic exercise of civil protest. Indeed, civil protest has proved itself time and again in Jamaica as a viable and effective weapon to solicit attention and generate more encompassing remedies to local problems than conventional means.

We must however decide whether it is justifiable for citizen-protestors to assume a stance of bullying (as opposed to lobbying) in order to achieve results. Violence cannot eclipse or be seen as a legitimate and more useful option of generating state response than modalities of peaceful (but effective, targeted) protest and civil negotiation. This is because, however fashionable, the wanton employment of radicalized and/or extremist forms of popular citizen action is evidence of the increasing rupturing of a civil way of life and the retreat of civil politics in Jamaica.

 

Why Jamaicans Protest (and Protest Violently)?

‘[Violence] is de only language those in power understan’…. The only means of compassion dem will show is when dem see flames and destruction’. This was the reasoning of a Rastafarian entertainer on what he sees as the necessity of violent protest. Recent protests across the world have exposed this problematic reality: despite the widespread popularity of the ‘global peace’ movement, popular citizen movements retain a promiscuous relationship with violence. Indeed, non-peaceful strategies (violence, intimidation and aggression) have come to far outweigh peaceful techniques in the contemporary models of protest assumed and performed by citizens during so-called civil protest (and other civic routines).

For example, for nine consecutive nights in November 2005, deprived immigrants, along with the poor working classes and the unemployed in Paris (and other cities), protested their demeaned social and economic status by engaging in coordinated acts of vandalism and arson. Protestors used home-made petrol bombs to torch some 900 cars and buildings while gangs of youths participated in fierce clashes with Parisian police. The French government likened this eruption of protest to ‘genuine guerrilla warfare’.

Far from France in the so-called ‘periphery’, thousands of pro-democracy activists and supporters, in April 2006, converged in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu for 14 straight days, in forceful opposition to the autocratic reign of King Gyanendra. Blocked roads, burning tyres, brick-throwing, police-citizen clashes, anti-government poetry, marches  and the police resorting to tear gas, rubber bullets, live rounds and savage beatings were the dominant themes of this citizen mobilization. Likewise, angry mobs took to the streets of the Solomon Islands in April 2006 to force the resignation of newly-elected Prime Minister, Synder Rini. These protests also had as their backdrop intensive violence – arson, vandalism and looting. Violent clashes between citizen-protestors and police/military also framed the 2007 pro-democracy protests in Burma and Pakistan.

Jamaica is by no means the exception. In fact, maximum disruption, including violence, has come to form the basis of civil protest in Jamaica. I, however, wish to lodge a caveat. The proclivity of modern Jamaica to engage in non-peaceful protest is rooted in a longstanding history of resistance to slavery, colonialism and the plantation system. It took non-peaceful protests to build Jamaica, to seek redress to injustices, to make claims and wrest concessions from the state, and for the Afro-Jamaican poor to cement their sense of place in this post colonial society. And non-peaceful protests have remained the dominant mode of struggle in the continuing search for change.

 

Why do Jamaicans protest?

‘We protest because we feel we nah get justice, and if we nah get justice, we will bu’n dung de place’, says one taxi-driver with whom I spoke. Citizens’ awareness of government’s obligation to provide ‘good governance’ and the perceived elusiveness of justice (social, political, economic and judicial) clearly compel contentious citizen politics in Jamaica. For example, deficient delivery of social services – water, proper roads, sewerage and electrification – and the prohibitive costs for telephone service, water and power usage, and issues regarding public transportation have triggered frequent mobilizations and roadblock-demonstrations since the mid 1990s.

Issues of justice, security and representation, embodied in human rights violations (police killings and abuse), inadequate and untrustworthy mechanisms of redress for grievances, insufficient protection against crime and the perceived right of vendors to ply their trade also regularly drive large numbers of Jamaican citizens onto the streets mounting roadblocks and engaging in disorderly demonstrations. Jamaican citizens are therefore responding to the many faces of poverty – unemployment, crime and inadequate social amenities.

Together these are fundamental to basic survival and the quality of life. Grassroots activism in Jamaica tends therefore to be linked to an ingrained moral economy built on the desire of the poor to survive, subsist, better their lives and assert their rights to justice and, in some instances, to claim autonomy for themselves and their community. In the face of widespread perception of state neglect, citizens feel unable to exercise any effective control over the policies of the state and the nature of their socio-economic condition except through vigorous and many times violent protest.

Peaceful forms of protest have thus, in the main, taken a backseat to intimidation, mayhem and violence in the models of popular protest institutionalized in Jamaica. These violent strategies are embodied in fiery roadblocks, disruptive street demonstrations and, in extreme cases, police–citizen clashes and gunfire exchanges, arson (burning police vehicles; public and private property), mob activity (looting and vandalism) as well as out and out war with the police. Aggressive negotiation by citizen-protestors have become a workable modus operandi in wresting justice from the state what they want; defined in terms of collective consumption, the right to subsist and, in instances, even freedom from official (police) surveillance and other features of modern social control.

 

The Role and Function of Violence

Violence helps to raise the visibility of protestors’ demands through its coverage on the mass media and the perception that the deployment of forceful strategies elicits more immediate responses from state bureaucracy. In the context of Jamaica where donmanship and criminality are increasingly normalized and political party competition historically assumes violence as a tool of contestation, violence as an apparatus in civilian politics is not all that extraordinary. In other words, given that violence has always been imported into the political mix, popular citizen politics necessarily exhibits residual elements of extra-legality and violence.

It is for this reason that I maintain that grassroots activism (and civilian politics more broadly) in Jamaica contains multiple elements, both legal and extra-legal. It is not always guided by the rules which inform civil discourse, civil action and civil negotiation which connote a sense of law-abidingness, orderliness and peacefulness. In fact, there is an entrenched lack of concern on the part of some citizens for alternative (read as peaceful) methods. Who cares if you picket peacefully? No protest like that is legitimate in the Jamaican experience. You have to mash up the place, burn tires on the streets and hold innocent people hostage in their homes in order to get attention or to get your demands met. In other words, the easiest way to announce that you are unhappy is to get into these negative behaviours. Recall the perspective of the taxi-driver – ‘if we feel we naah get justice, we will bun dung the place’.