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Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can't Dance, It’s Not My Revolution
As we play, we step away from stark reality to conjure up new possibilities for the present and our common future. Today, a new cohort of social activists are using it to create social change and reinvent democratic social relations. In contrast to work or routine, play must be free. To the extent that it is, it infuses a high-octane burst of innovation into any number of organizational practices and contexts, and invites social actors to participate in a low-threshold, highly democratic process of collaboration, based on pleasure and convivial social relations. Despite the contention that such activities are counterproductive, movements continue to put the right to party on the table as a part of a larger process of social change, as humor and pleasure disrupt monotony, while disarming systems of power.
Through this book, Shepard explores notions of play as a social movement activity, considering some of the meanings, applications and history of the concept in relation to social movement groups ranging from Dada and Surrealism to Situationism, the Yippies to the Young Lords, ACT UP to the Global Justice, anti-gentrification, community and anti-war movements of recent years.
Through this book, Shepard explores notions of play as a social movement activity, considering some of the meanings, applications and history of the concept in relation to social movement groups ranging from Dada and Surrealism to Situationism, the Yippies to the Young Lords, ACT UP to the Global Justice, anti-gentrification, community and anti-war movements of recent years.
- GenresActivism
330 pages, Hardcover
First published December 21, 2010
About the author
Benjamin Heim Shepard
10 books2 followersBenjamin Shepard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Human Service at New York School of Technology/City University of New York. He received his Masters at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and training in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in their Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. As a social worker he worked in AIDS housing settings from San Francisco to Chicago to New York, where he directed the start ups for two congregate housing programs for people with HIV/AIDS, as well as served as Deputy Director at CitiWide Harm Reduction.
He has done organizing work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets New York, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd Response Team, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, the More Gardens Coalition, and the Times UP Bike Lane Liberation Front and Garden Working Groups. Combing ethnography with social change activism, his work considers the interplay between theory and practice.
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June 14, 2019
To many, there could be little that is less playful than a social movement, a cluster of activists rallying for their cause – be it the blazer-wearing Brexit brigade grumbling about taking back control in their fantasies of Empire, or the hair shirt left setting up their table in the high street and handing out their exclamation mark infested leaflets demanding freedom now! But stop and listen; behind the surface appearance (I can’t speak for the blazer-wearers: not my scene, but have been around the hair shirt left for long enough, exclamation marks and all) there is often a playfulness, a discourse of irony or tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation underpinning the seriousness of it all. It helps keep us sane as the struggles intensify and the forces of oppression seem to fight back with increasing vigour and success.
As important as this sanity-protecting playfulness is, that’s not what Ben Shepard is exploring in this fabulous piece of sociological analysis; he is, instead, looking at playfulness as a movement tactic, as a means and site of disruption unsettling the discourses of Power and enlivening the struggles, as well as building community and enhancing transformation. Although there is a specific focus on activist networks in New York City from the later 1990s to the mid-2000s much of what he is discussing can be seen elsewhere, and crucially was part of wider networks he touches on in various places. He contextualises these campaigns and their movements in three interwoven trajectories. The first is a 20th century philosophy of disruption marked by movements such as Dada in the wake of the 1914-18 war and Situationism emerging in France in the late 1950s and hitting its highest profile during the events of May 1968 (here he mirrors Greil Marcus’s excellent history of punk in Lipstick Traces to provide a complementary and divergent outcome of that strand of modern cultural activism). Second, he then explores the US circumstances of spectacular activism associated with the Yippies, in part to show the connections and in part to critique the US-movement’s reification of the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. Third, he then brings the specifics of his analysis closer to home by showing the movement links, in tactics and in people, to the late LGBTQ+ campaigns through the ‘70s reaching their apex in the ‘80s/’90s activism highlighted by ACT-UP in its work around HIV-related issues and wider questions of sexuality, health and the state.
These three trajectories then allow Shepard to take us into campaigns waged from New York’s Lower East Side in the later 1990s with much of the discussion turned over to two major struggles – the defence of community gardens as freely accessible public space in heavily and densely populated parts of the City, and the emergence of NYC Reclaim the Streets as a further defence of public space and resistance to the corporatisation and privatisation of urban space. Unlike many analyses of activist campaigns however the focus here is not on the goals and outcomes, and neither is it wrapped in dominant tendencies in social movement analysis such as resource mobilisation theory. This is a discussion of means, not ends, of tactics, not institutional allies. This is a discussion of DIY politics, not as some arcane theorisation of horizontalism or exposition on utopian pre-figuration (although both are an important part of Shepard’s explorations), but as a discussion of the ways that playfulness, performance and fun are significant factors in building and maintaining social movements.
Towards the end of the book he explores the emergence in the global justice movement of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) which was one of the era’s most high profile groups, and mentions, almost in passing, an image that to a large degree sums up a big part of his argument. Taken during one of CIRCA’s UK actions linked to the G8 conference in 2005, the image of a clown kissing a police riot shield shows the ways in which play and playfulness in activism disarms and disrupts the state and wrong-foots those maintaining ‘order’ and protecting Power.
It also highlights two other key points that he makes: first, that symbolic activism can be incredibly powerful, and second (and linked to his points about the reification of 1968), that movements must continually reinvent their tactics of they become stale and the movement becomes out-manoeuvred. This final point is aptly and powerfully made in his discussion of how the movement responded to the changing circumstances after the attacks on New York & Washington DC in September 2001, and second how the movement developed absurdist responses to the subsequent absurd war – which in itself brought to a head the limitations of playful politics in times of crisis: pointing to the question: when does the circumstance become too serious for play?
Although time constrained – the discussion covers the period c1995-c2005 – Shepard wraps his case up with an analysis that outlines a set of transferable outcomes, asking what the limits of play might be, what its strengths and weaknesses are in movement terms and considering how and why we might want to study play(fullness) is activist political movements. He makes a powerful case for play and playfulness to be part of a repertoire of tactics and against play and playfulness as the major or only means of action, highlighting the importance of multiple modes of action – legal and otherwise, with a well-developed media programme and clear objectives, with a solid sense of how the full set of tactical approaches interrelate and build something bigger.
This, in itself, is a powerful contribution reinforcing elements of Larry Bogad’s excellent Tactical Performance: Serious Play and Social Movements traversing similar questions. Bogad makes repeated appearances in Shepard’s discussion, and one of the large number of fellow activists interviewed as part of the research underpinning the discussion. Shepard does well to weave together his experience as a movement activist, these interviews and his seemingly copious field notes for the era to give us an essential piece of work of social movement studies, of play studies and of advice to activists. Despite being a decidedly academic text, Shepard has a clear, accessible and engaging writing style building his case from rich activist moments to be evidentially sound and analytically sharp. This is a must read for academics and activists (and for activist academics).
As important as this sanity-protecting playfulness is, that’s not what Ben Shepard is exploring in this fabulous piece of sociological analysis; he is, instead, looking at playfulness as a movement tactic, as a means and site of disruption unsettling the discourses of Power and enlivening the struggles, as well as building community and enhancing transformation. Although there is a specific focus on activist networks in New York City from the later 1990s to the mid-2000s much of what he is discussing can be seen elsewhere, and crucially was part of wider networks he touches on in various places. He contextualises these campaigns and their movements in three interwoven trajectories. The first is a 20th century philosophy of disruption marked by movements such as Dada in the wake of the 1914-18 war and Situationism emerging in France in the late 1950s and hitting its highest profile during the events of May 1968 (here he mirrors Greil Marcus’s excellent history of punk in Lipstick Traces to provide a complementary and divergent outcome of that strand of modern cultural activism). Second, he then explores the US circumstances of spectacular activism associated with the Yippies, in part to show the connections and in part to critique the US-movement’s reification of the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. Third, he then brings the specifics of his analysis closer to home by showing the movement links, in tactics and in people, to the late LGBTQ+ campaigns through the ‘70s reaching their apex in the ‘80s/’90s activism highlighted by ACT-UP in its work around HIV-related issues and wider questions of sexuality, health and the state.
These three trajectories then allow Shepard to take us into campaigns waged from New York’s Lower East Side in the later 1990s with much of the discussion turned over to two major struggles – the defence of community gardens as freely accessible public space in heavily and densely populated parts of the City, and the emergence of NYC Reclaim the Streets as a further defence of public space and resistance to the corporatisation and privatisation of urban space. Unlike many analyses of activist campaigns however the focus here is not on the goals and outcomes, and neither is it wrapped in dominant tendencies in social movement analysis such as resource mobilisation theory. This is a discussion of means, not ends, of tactics, not institutional allies. This is a discussion of DIY politics, not as some arcane theorisation of horizontalism or exposition on utopian pre-figuration (although both are an important part of Shepard’s explorations), but as a discussion of the ways that playfulness, performance and fun are significant factors in building and maintaining social movements.
Towards the end of the book he explores the emergence in the global justice movement of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) which was one of the era’s most high profile groups, and mentions, almost in passing, an image that to a large degree sums up a big part of his argument. Taken during one of CIRCA’s UK actions linked to the G8 conference in 2005, the image of a clown kissing a police riot shield shows the ways in which play and playfulness in activism disarms and disrupts the state and wrong-foots those maintaining ‘order’ and protecting Power.
It also highlights two other key points that he makes: first, that symbolic activism can be incredibly powerful, and second (and linked to his points about the reification of 1968), that movements must continually reinvent their tactics of they become stale and the movement becomes out-manoeuvred. This final point is aptly and powerfully made in his discussion of how the movement responded to the changing circumstances after the attacks on New York & Washington DC in September 2001, and second how the movement developed absurdist responses to the subsequent absurd war – which in itself brought to a head the limitations of playful politics in times of crisis: pointing to the question: when does the circumstance become too serious for play?
Although time constrained – the discussion covers the period c1995-c2005 – Shepard wraps his case up with an analysis that outlines a set of transferable outcomes, asking what the limits of play might be, what its strengths and weaknesses are in movement terms and considering how and why we might want to study play(fullness) is activist political movements. He makes a powerful case for play and playfulness to be part of a repertoire of tactics and against play and playfulness as the major or only means of action, highlighting the importance of multiple modes of action – legal and otherwise, with a well-developed media programme and clear objectives, with a solid sense of how the full set of tactical approaches interrelate and build something bigger.
This, in itself, is a powerful contribution reinforcing elements of Larry Bogad’s excellent Tactical Performance: Serious Play and Social Movements traversing similar questions. Bogad makes repeated appearances in Shepard’s discussion, and one of the large number of fellow activists interviewed as part of the research underpinning the discussion. Shepard does well to weave together his experience as a movement activist, these interviews and his seemingly copious field notes for the era to give us an essential piece of work of social movement studies, of play studies and of advice to activists. Despite being a decidedly academic text, Shepard has a clear, accessible and engaging writing style building his case from rich activist moments to be evidentially sound and analytically sharp. This is a must read for academics and activists (and for activist academics).
Displaying 1 of 1 review