Queer Velocities: Critical Mass, Recurrent Institutions, and Political Trust (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Pluralizing Political Theory: Contemporary Queer Contributions (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

The question of institutions recurs as a point of contention within pluralism. Rather than condemn or redeem institutions, I embark to queer our understanding of institutions through consideration of Critical Mass, a monthly bicycle-ridden protest. Critical Mass presents us with an event of agonistic democratic insurgency that has become an “institution” in cities across the United States and around the world merely through its recurrent assertion of destituent power. In this way, Critical Mass suggests that an incredibly skeletal institutional arrangement can nevertheless enable recurrent events of spontaneous, or else minimally predicated, democratic agonism.

To be more precise, in naming the event of a Critical Mass bicycle ride an institution I mean that it is constituted, however sparsely, both temporally and spatially: The Mass begins on the final Friday of every month, at the height of the rush-hour commute, and every ride departs en masse from the same designated location, typically in the heart of an urban downtown center, allowing a critical density of bicycle riders to assemble prior to the ride beginning. Apart from these two constant variables, the initial from-where and when, which simply function to conduce the event, what follows is largely unpredictable by virtue of being a live, mobile assertion of a non-automotive right to the public thoroughfares of the city. This claim is made on the move, in a mobilized demobilization of automotive flows that enacts a real recoding of streets that prioritizes movement at a slower pace—a velo or human-powered velocity—even if momentarily. Streets become, as the Mass passes through, thoroughfares of physical and emotional pleasure, public performance, and political protest that route the interlinked global crises of climate change, white supremacy, capitalism, and pandemic to the local, street level. Thus, if Critical Mass is now an “institution” in so many municipalities, it is so in excess of the two constant, conducive variables of “from-where and when,” and this requires consideration of how Critical Mass is able to temporarily render the streets inoperable by putting them to a different, destituent use.

This other use is both concrete and symbolic. On the one hand, the ride affects a real material disruption of normal traffic that, by blocking cars with an uninterrupted flow of bicycles, reprioritizes the uses of roads as servicing the needs of non-combustive movement. This is accomplished by the tactic of corking, or blocking intersections to enable the Mass to roll through, that is at turns cordial and combative. On the other, corking realizes a more symbolic strategy of enacting an alternative ordering of our cities, even if only fleetingly and on the fly, with such campy hyperbole that the prospect of the end of this world does not seem so catastrophic.
Yet, while the effect of the bicycle bloc’s blockage is relatively ephemeral, what further distinguishes the Critical Mass bicycle ride as an event is its promise of eternal recurrence, a promise which only commits itself one month at a time, even as each act of fidelity to the event renews the promise, casting ahead a horizon that cruises the contingent and fleeting “then and there” of the political on its destination to “wherever.” This rhythm of recurrence, more finely, allows the event to enable participants to build relations of trust. Through the recurrence of the event, participants come to trust not only that the event will recur, and thus to trust a world in which events of democratic agonism are promised to irrupt, but simultaneously to build relations of trust with fellow participants in the event, as well as, ideally, those bystanders and motorists who are impacted by the course of the event, and beyond. Finally, and most decisively, one comes to trust one’s own capacity to act in meaningful and impactful ways through the concerted efforts of commonly mobilized strangers.

The effect is that participants come to understand that they are the institution in their very enactment of it, that what gives any institution its durability is the people who show up to make their coming together something real and meaningful, simultaneously unpredictable and yet collectively oriented. This helps us understand how, beyond its repression in cities like New York, the tactic of massing or swarming that typifies Critical Mass has become the norm for 21st century protest politics. This tactic proved resurgent in NYC in 2019 with the FTP protests that swarmed Grand Central to render the MTA momentarily free to use and again in 2020 when cyclists assembling as Street Justice Riders NYC remobilized the Critical Mass tactic of corking in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. This trust in oneself, others, and the world as hosting demotic dissensus is powerful, potentiating rhizomatic lines of affiliation and solidarity.

Author

• Samuel R. Galloway, Purchase College