Disrupting the Sensible: Oppositional Community and the Conduct of Politics in South African Protests

• In Event: Interventions in Media and Communication Studies Through Jacque Rancière

Abstract

How do marginalized individuals constitute oppositional publics? What are the interiorities of such opposition? This presentation expands on French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible in interrogating individual subjectivity, intersubjective transmission, and mobilization among activist collectives in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on fieldwork examining performance protest strategies within the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) and ongoing student activism demanding that #FeesMustFall, I demonstrate the import of sensorial interventions in the making of community and the conduct of politics. Rancière’s discussion regarding a partition of the sensible elucidates how some experiences and populations are rendered intelligible and others unintelligible even in close proximity. Politics—as deployed here through protest mobilization efforts—concerns the disruption of such partitions of the sensorial and sensible as occurs when marginalized communities attempt to expose their plight to the awareness of those who barely take notice. This deployment of politics, then, is a rupturing of or break away from previously established aesthetic regimes with a scope of impact that is at once individual (at the level of sensation) and transmissive (through spatial and temporal affective circulation).

Author

• Omotayo Jolaosho, U of South Florida