Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

• In Event: Insurgencies and Assemblies: Towards a Politics of the Street

Abstract

In 1992, four Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted on all charges of excessive force in beating Black motorist Rodney King. These acquittals set off a firestorm on the streets of Los Angeles that came to be known as the Los Angeles Uprising or the Rodney King riots – depending on whom you ask. Compare these 1992 events with a march of 70,000 participants into downtown Los Angeles challenging Proposition 187, a statewide initiative to bar undocumented immigrants from accessing state services and establish a system to report those suspected of being undocumented. As the designation “march” reveals, public audiences generally saw political content and legitimacy in the 1994 gathering. The same was not the case with the 1992 events: as the contest over its naming suggests, at least some audiences saw those on the streets as a scattering of lawless individuals or senseless mobs. What explains this differential attribution of political legitimacy?

To answer this question, I develop a performative account of political assembly, and I do so by contrasting the public receptions to these two events. The 1994 march adhered to certain expectations about what a gathering should look like and who should be involved, what I call norms of form and actor – for instance, those concerning orderliness and (self-stated or perceived) intention. Moreover, this particular gathering occurred in a chain of similarly understood ones held across the state, such that together they consolidated the sense of a collective identity. So in spite of the racist and xenophobic sentiments that put Prop. 187 on the ballot in the first place, the 1994 march effected a political collective, one engaged in political action. By contrast, the gatherings in 1992 were illegible from within the bounds of these norms and effected neither collective identity nor political action. As a result, the complex of assemblies appeared to be illegitimate as forms of political assembly.

My argument is this: public gatherings that adhere to contingent norms about an assembly’s form and actor generate the performative effect of a political collectivity. Those that create the sense of a collective identity – a “we” or a group unit assembled on the streets – retroactively appear to be the work of a collective actor. Gatherings that are iterated over time and space consolidate this sense of collectivity. It is with this collective identity that the assembled come to be seen as a coherent political actor and these acts of gathering come to be seen as political action. The attribution of legitimacy to a public gathering is in part a function of its generation of political collectivity.

Author

• Stacey Liou, University of Florida