Protest Now and Again

Rebecca Schneider
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2010 (T 206), pp. 7-11 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press

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Protest Now and Again Rebecca Schneider

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the pasts fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. Howard Zinn (2007:1112) These are queer times indeed. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (2007:204) In 2007, 36 years after he delivered a speech on the Boston Commons to protest the war in Vietnam, and in the same year that artist-activist Mark Tribe staged a reenactment of the protest speech as part of his Port Huron Project, Howard Zinn published a commentary on history as creative. The promise for the future, Zinn writes in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, is in the pasts fugitive moments. Tribes Port Huron Project takes the promise of fugitive time quite literally. Orchestrating the live reenactment of six protest speeches delivered between 1965 and 1971 by a variety of antiwar activists, Tribe disperses or circulates one time (1960s) across or within another time (2000s), and then further disperses or circulates that laminated time across multiple media at multiple and shifting sites.1 The Project includes live reenactments of speeches, delivered by actors at original sites, which then become videos, DVDs, still photographs, billboard displays, and a bookall of which are the Project, none of which is a privileged object nor singular event.2 Thus the Port Huron Project itself takes place in multiple times, across multiple registers, in multiple media. Arguably, the sense of multiple sites gives a kind of credential twist to the aspect of multiple or fugitive time that is the politic of temporal play at the projects base. What are fugitive moments? And when is fugitive time? Could such moments be, perhaps, past moments on the run in the present? Moments when the past flashes up now to present us with its own alternative futuresfutures we might choose to realize differently? Might the pasts fugitive moments be leaky, syncopated, and errant momentsmoments stitched through with repetition and manipulated to recur in works of performance, works of ritual, works of art, works of reenactment that play with time as malleable material? As malleable political material?
1. The Port Huron Project entailed six reenactments staged between 2006 and 2008. Coretta Scott King, Paul Potter, and Howard Zinn were the first three in the series. Creative Time then commissioned three moreCesar Chavez, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichaelto accompany Democracy in America, a large-scale exhibition at New York Citys Park Avenue Armory. In each case, the speech was reenacted at the same spot where it first took placefrom Boston and New York and Washington to Los Angeles and Oakland, California. 2. Similarly, this essay intentionally takes place more than once under the same title. A version is forthcoming in Tribe (2010). Neither version can be said to be the original. Both are simultaneous takes on the Port Huron Project, with minor differences and twists. My thanks to TDR, Mark Tribe, and Edizioni Charta for allowing this less-than-usual practice of simultaneous publication. Comment

Rebecca Schneider is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and a TDR Contributing Editor.
TDR: The Drama Review 54:2 (T206) Summer 2010. 2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Might the pasts fugitive moments not only remind us of yesterdays sense of tomorrow, but also compose the sense again and offer, without expiration date, a politic of possibility? It is certainly true, and Tribe notes it as well: the question of how to effectively protest government and multinational corporate actions under neoliberal global capital has flummoxed the Left across the Bush era (and beyond). He credits his students at Brown University for illustrating to him just how drastically basic questions of activismsuch as, What can we do now? get tongue-tied in neoliberal excuses or bummed out by Old Left Melancholies (see Tribe 2010; see also Brown 1999). As some students bemoaned: Any rhetoric of protest always already seems outdated. Tribe, then, meets the issue of outdatedness head-on. In the Port Huron Project, he plays the outdated again as if to ask not only how to protest, but when to protest. His approach to when is not to say that now is not the right time, but to say that now is material, has duration, and, as if working in mixed media, to say that one time can be composed in another time. Think of it this way: must protest always only happen in a now considered distinct from prior Figure 1. Howard Zinn speaking at a peace rally in Boston nows or future nows? In another of his Common on 5 May 1971. (Photo by Daniel Ellsberg) many spurs to action, Zinn wrote: We are not starting from scratch (1990:7). That is, we are not starting nowor, our now is not only now. Of course, when playing in the crossfire of time, letting anachronism do its creative work, things can feel a little uncanny, or dislocated, unsettling, or queer. They can also feel like downright bad art. For surely, most would say: The speech was great the first time! The second time is farce, fake, theatre. The first time was on target. The second time is way off, late, minor, drag, DIY, any-clown-can-do-it. The first time was true. The second time is false, etiolated, hollow, or infelicitous. The second time, the third time, the nth time were not actual. Thus: the second time was lesser. But like Simone DeBeauvoirs second sex, or like Susan-Lori Parkss character the Lesser Known in The America Play (himself a Lincoln reenactor), the minor, minoritarian, forgotten, overlooked, disavowed, unsung, second, double, and lesser gain a kind of agency in the re-do. Similarly, the idea that anyone can do it takes the nascent shape of hope in the vexed arena of reenactment, troubling the prerogatives of linear time with the idea of the return not of the Great Man, but of anyone. In fact, questions of the returns of history that arise around such reenactments can be mind-boggling: What happens to linear history if nothing is ever fully completed nor discretely begun? When does a call to action, cast into the future, fully take place? Only in the moment of the call? Or can a call to action be resonant in the varied and reverberant cross-temporal spaces where an echo might encounter responseeven years and years later? Can we call back in time? Across time? What kind of

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response might we elicit? When does that which has soundeddeferred as an invocation or an appeal, a plea, or a prod for future action nowultimately occur? What are the limits of this future? What are the limits of this Now?3 Discussing the Port Huron Project, Tribe writes: revolution seems impossible, at least for now (2010). And so, the artist makes work that touches another temporal register, bringing an alternative Figure 2. Matthew Floyd Miller delivering Howard Zinns 1971 speech on location in Now into play and using Boston Common on 14 July 2007. The Port Huron Project, staged by Mark Tribe. seeming anachronism, (Photo by Meghan Boudreau; courtesy of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc suggestive deferral, and -sa/2.0/deed.en/) explicit repetition as political and aesthetic spurs to thought. His work may be playing fast and loose with Now but Angela Davis studded her 1969 DeFremery Park speech with the word.4 Now resounds enough times that replaying it in the present might make anachronism less an error of happenstance and more a kind of tolling bell against the industrywarthat Davis so eloquently deplores. Now is still now if we are still, now, waging war. The site of now is, of course, the celebrated substance of live performance. Live performance is most often (and some would say too often) considered to be an ephemeral medium due to its composition in time. According to dominant art historical logic: live performance takes place only now, and otherwise disappears (see Schneider 2001). But Tribe and many other artists

3. In this vein, and in homage to NOW (National Organization for Women), we can consider artists such as Mary Kelly and Sharon Hayes, who have recently reenacted precedent feminist protest actions. Mary Kellys WLM Demo Remix (2005) is a 90-second film loop in which Kelly uses a slow dissolve to blend a photo of a reenactment of a 1970 womens liberation movement political demonstration in New York City with the archival photo the first image reenacts. The loop begins with the later image and slowly dissolves to combine past and presentwith the archival image either superimposed upon or shining through the photo of the reenactment. In Kellys piece, the present image never completely fadesand the archival image is never completely clear. Sharon Hayess ongoing project In the Near Future stages anachronistic actions of protest. Once a day, from 1 to 9 November 2005, Hayes stood on the street with a sign at nine different locations throughout New York City. One of the signs read Ratify E.R.A. Now. 4. Videos of the Port Huron reenactments, including Davis, can be found at http://www.marktribe.net/art/porthuron-project/. Interestingly, the actress replaying Daviss speech (republished in Tribe 2010) does not sound the Now bell as often as the word occurs in the speechleaving it as a kind of ghost note in the present. Of course, the minor errors inevitable in live replaying invite extremely generative questions, beyond the scope of this essay, on theatrical error itself as a space for possibility, change, renewal, even activism (see Ridout 2006). However, and perhaps conservatively, Tribes decision to cast his actors with some degree of verisimilitude for gender and race raises interesting questions. Why verisimilitude? What are the bounds of replay and what are the wages of bodily recognition? Is re-protest really as open to alternative futures as we might imagine if identity politics (re)determines the field?

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currently engaging reenactment complicate the singularity of now and approach performance by mixing and matching time, playing across temporal registers through explicitly and literally re-playing. The re-play is arguably the property of theatre that Gertrude Stein called its troubling syncopated time (1935:93)a trouble many contemporary artists are keen to deploy. The queering of time (to borrow from 21st-century scholars such as Ann Pellegrini, Janet Jakobsen, Carla Frecerro, Carolyn Dinshaw, Jasbir Puar, and Elizabeth Freeman) troubles our heritage of Enlightenment (and capitalist) investments in straightforward linearity as the only way to mark timeand points to a politic in veering, revolving, or turning around. So, to go back for a moment: even if revolution seems impossible, at least for now, as Tribe writes, his own work suggests that it may nevertheless be possible to revolve. This is the sense of revolution that the cultural materialist Raymond Williams, whose work was widely read by the New Left in the 1960s, brings out in his influential Keywords, where he reminds us not to forget that the word revolution stems from simply turning around ([1976] 1985:270). Perhaps this sense of revolution has gained a certain political viabilityat least in art circles. The sheer numbers of 21st-century artists exploring reenactment as medial material, as a fertile mode of inquiry, as a means of making and as a mode of art practice, should be indicative of a turn toward temporality as malleable substance, capable of intervention and (re)articulation. In such a turn, in-time events themselves might be given, like an object, to (re)touchcausing one to question the promises as well as the limits in thinking through (and even acting in) cross-temporality. Does cross-temporality or inter-temporality bear material weight or pull? Or, using Elizabeth Freemans terms (2000), is there political efficacity in temporal drag?5 I started with the Zinn epigraph, above, because the Howard Zinn re-speech was the only one of Tribes Port Huron Project reenactments I attended at the live moment of its performance. Seeing the reenactment live on the Boston Commons, flush (if not packed) with photographers and videographers as well as passersby, and listening to the againness of the actor re-intoning Zinns speech, there was no hiding the fact that this re-event was not about singular moments, ephemerality, or the disappearance of some unitary performing subject. Rather, the liveness of the event was itself syncopated with other times no longer live. The time, then, was not (only) now. It was past and present, present and deferred into the future when it would obviously be reencountered screenally. The presence of technology and the explicit citationality of re-speech tilted time off of the straight and narroweven at moments when it seemed that Zinn might indeed be speaking about today (too). Perhaps particularly in the re-live event, time was explicitly folded. There was simply no singular or discreet nowness to the action re-acted, nor was there any invitation to suspend disbelief and forget that it was, indeed, now it was 2007 and not 1971. But then, even in 1971, Zinn was not starting from scratch. Listening to the Zinn reenactor, I looked across the way to other performers and activists simultaneously using some of the Commons space nearby. There was a living sculpture mime standing rock still in whiteface as if timeless. Another man protested the Chinese governments treatment of the Falun Gong by displaying photographs of tortured practitioners. A Christian fundamentalist read aloud from the Bible beside a poster advertising salvation and the second coming. I wondered exactly what was anachronistic in any of these the scenes, including the faux Zinn, and what was not? How was there even such a thing as anachronism when the citational or ritual properties of passersby waving hello, or stopping to listen to Zinn for a moment before tossing a dime to the Statue of Liberty mime, were as studded with cross-temporal possibili-

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5. The act of revolving, or turning, or pivoting off of a linear track, may not be nostalgic, if nostalgia implies a melancholic attachment to loss and an assumed impossibility of return. Rather, the turn to the pastor a gestic journey through the pasts possible alternative futuresbears a political purpose for a critical approach to futurity unhinged from Enlightenment and capitalist investment in time as linear. On the limits of the American denigration of nostalgia as compared with the cross-temporal and visceral promise in the Greek root, see C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994:4). See Julia Bryan-Wilson on nostalgia in Tribes work (2008).

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ties, references, and memories as the Zinn reenactment itself? That the actor Matthew Floyd Miller was not Zinn himself, that the date was not May 1971, that references to now were also thennone of these things could fully dismiss the possibility of efficacity. That some attendees or passersby might have shrugged and said its only an act, or that some YouTube viewers might sigh and think too bad the time for action is over, or that some of us who are curious might wonder at the seeming ability of Tribe to arrive so late to the scenethese criticisms are only one aspect of the events time-warped theatricality. The flip side to these important criticisms is an equally important possibilityone that irrupts only sporadically in listening to the re-speeches: the fugitive moments of dis-temporality, of uncanniness, of error, or of a return to sense that happens in pauses, or stray sentences, or tiny moments when the now folds and multiplieseven if only for a fugitive flash. The promise in a flash of fugitive realization feels something like: Yes We Can. Yes We Can protest now. And yes we must protest the limits of a now handily considered by Left Melancholists to be completely subjugated to the terms of linear time. The time to protest the war in Afghanistan is not over. The time to protest the war in Iraq is not over. The time to protest the war in Vietnam is not over. And as Zinn has made clear across his lifes work, the time to protest WWII is not over. Clearly, if sadly, the time to protest the Crusades is not over. In fact, the time to protest war and its inevitable ties to industry, to capital, and to the drive to empire is not, and is never, complete. (My scholarship begins to sound like a protest speechas if such speech might be infectious?) It is Now. It is Again. It is the necessary vigilance of arguing for NeverAgain. And Again.
References Brown, Wendy. 1999. Resisting Left Melancholy. boundary 2 26, 3:1927. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2008. Sounding the Fury: Kirsten Forkert and Mark Tribe. Artforum XLVI, 5 (January):9596. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2000. Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations. New Literary History 31, 4:72744. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. Performance Remains. Performance Research 6, 2:10008. Seremetakis, C. Nadia, ed. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder: Westview Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1935. Lectures in America. New York: Random House. Tribe, Mark. 2010. The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches. Milan: Edizioni Charta. Williams, Raymond. [1976] 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zinn, Howard. 1990. Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology. New York: Perennial. Zinn, Howard. 2007. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

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