Protest

Make Love Not War, Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible, Keine Macht für Niemanden, We are the 99%: The history of the last fifty (or 100 or 150) years has been accompanied by a constant flow of statements, of practices, of declarations of dissatisfaction with regard to prevailing conditions. When something is able to reach from the margins of society into its very center-something mostly unorganized and unruly, sometimes violent, rarely controllable-it forges ahead in the form of a protest. This takes place in (real or virtual) spaces and is accomplished by (likewise real or virtual) bodies. The spaces and the bodies to which the protest relates are the spaces of politics and society. It masterfully and creatively draws on contemporary signs and symbols, subverting and transforming them to engender new aesthetics and meanings, thereby opening up a space that eludes control. From a position of powerlessness, irony, subversion, and provocation are its tools for pricking small but palpable pinholes into the controlling system of rule.The publication Protest presents and reflects on present and past forms of protest and looks at marginalized communities' practices of resistance from a wide variety of perspectives. Social, culture-historical, sociological, and political-scientific perspectives play as much of a role here as approaches that draw on image theory, popular culture, cultural studies or contemporary positions from the arts. In the process, the book takes into account in particular such present-day developments as the virtualization of protest, how it has been turned into the fictional, and its exploitation in politics by power-holders of all shades.