Towards a visual middle voice : crisis, dispossession, and spectrality in Spain's hologram protest

  • As a legitimizing mechanism for a doctrine of 'no alternatives,' crisis rhetoric tends to rely on distinctions between 'right' and 'wrong' that often turn political decisions into pseudo-choices between a legitimate and an illegitimate (even catastrophic) alternative. This binary logic also pervades the ways subjects are cast in this rhetoric as either active or passive, guilty or innocent, masters or victims. [...] The rhetorical reliance on the oppositions of passive/active or victims/perpetrators extends to several contexts of 'crisis' in Europe today, as Maria Boletsi shows. Against the backdrop of the crisis rhetoric and the monologic narratives and dualistic distinctions it produces, the need for alternative forms of expression is amplified. In this article, Boletsi makes a case for the "middle voice" as an expressive modality that can introduce alternative 'grammars' of subjectivity and agency to those on which dominant crisis rhetoric hinges. [...] To that end, Boletsi centers on a peculiar public protest in front of the Spanish Parliament in Madrid in April 2015, opposing a (then) newly introduced Spanish law—the "Law of Citizen Security" - which significantly restricted the citizens' freedom of assembly and expression in the name of security and crisis-management. Unlike any other protest, this one was not carried out by actual people, but by holographic projections of protesters. This 'hologram protest' put forward a form of dispossession, whereby bodies asserted presence in public space through their absence. Unsettling the boundaries between fiction and reality, materiality and immateriality, power and impotence, past and present, the protest fostered a spectral space that functioned as a visual analogue of the middle voice. The spectral subjectivity that this 'ghost march' enacted, both underscored and challenged politically induced conditions of dispossession and precarity, through and against these conditions. As a result, the protest recast crisis as a critical threshold from which alternative narratives of the present and the future can emerge.

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Metadaten
Author:Maria Boletsi
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-516826
ISBN:978-3-8498-1292-8
ISSN:1432-5306
Parent Title (German):Komparatistik : Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
Publisher:Aisthesis Verlag
Place of publication:Bielefeld
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of Completion:2019
Year of first Publication:2018
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2019/12/03
GND Keyword:Griechenland; Spanien; Krise; Rhetorik; Medium <Linguistik>; Protest
Volume:2017
Page Number:16
First Page:20
Last Page:35
HeBIS-PPN:457984341
Dewey Decimal Classification:8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik
Sammlungen:CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / Aisthesis Verlag
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:Komparatistik : Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / Komparatistik : Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft ; 2017
:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-516816
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht