Realistic Radicalism: Despair, judgment, and the formulation of activist policy demands.

• In Event: Critical Theory, Race, and Literature

Abstract

Scholars of protest movements typically consider activist radicalization by emphasizing the role of state repression. While a powerful explanatory frame, this dominant model risks rendering activists perpetually reactive to state initiative. Without discounting state repression, I focus instead on the proactive dynamics of judgment that drive the formulation and modification of activist policy demands. In particular, I argue that negative affective states often associated with hopelessness are conducive to radicalization processes because enjoining proximity to unwelcome reality. I develop this thesis in relation to Black Lives Matter, where activists iterated a series of increasingly radical demands that intensified during the protest campaign. I contend this was a dialectical and affectively mediated process that was informed by the despair over prior approaches and demands, and which in turn spurred on more radical activist orientations and policy formulations. Thus, far from reactive, I propose activists undertook sophisticated emotional, strategic, and political theoretical processing where they not only saw the world like increasingly militant activists, but felt themselves to be increasingly radicalized. Notably, however, I draw on scholarship exemplified by Deva Woodly to insist that the pragmatism of the movement was related to this ambivalent affective habitus, where radicalism never radicalized past the reality principle. Yet, in situating the world historic demand to defund the police as thus emerging from a process of tarrying with defeat, I conclude that the real, rather than posing an insurmountable condition, is susceptible to activist contouring where negative emotion plays a positive role.

Author

• Samuel R Galloway, Purchase College, SUNY