Demonstrations are protests of innocence.

08-15-08

 Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.- Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

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The aims of a demonstration, however, are symbolic: it demonstrates a force that is scarcely used.

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They present themselves as a target to the forces of repression serving the State authority against whose policies they are protesting.

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Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.

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If the State authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary;

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The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality – the intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.

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It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together.

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State authorities usually lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little difference. The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.

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The more people there are there, the more forcibly they represent to each other and to themselves those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction.

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Those who take part become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity. They begin to recognise that the function of their class need no longer be limited: that it, too, like the demonstrations itself, can create its own function.*

The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They ‘cut off these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatise the power they still lack.

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By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence – a greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic – than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives.

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They become corporately aware that it is they or those whom they represent who have built the city and who maintain it.

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The demonstrators present themselves as a target to the so-called forces of law and order. Yet the larger the target they present, the stronger they feel.

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The contradiction between their actual vulnerability and their sense of invincibility corresponds to the dilemma which they force upon the State authority

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It is in the nature of a demonstration to provoke violence upon itself.

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The historical role of demonstrations is to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority. Demonstrations are protests of innocence.

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There is an innocence to be defended and an innocence which must finally be lost: an innocence which derives from justice, and an innocence which is the consequence of a lack of experience.

 

 

- read the complete essay: The Nature of Mass Demonstrations, John Berger