Exit the system’ Crafting the place of protest camps between antagonism and exception

The practice of many protest camps indicates ways of a middle ground that prevent both extremes. Crucial here is an understanding of politics as akin to theatre and indeed artificial. The fact that the aforementioned guide-books often come across as parodies points towards the important role of irony in balancing between the extremes. More importantly these issues can only be successfully tackled to the extent that the camps operate as open political spaces. This involves bearing the contradictions that occur when creating an antagonistic space and preventing tendencies inside the camp to understand it as ontologically different to the status quo. Rather the camp is playacting at this, pretending that this was possible. The theatrical mode must not be conceived as a delusion however, because this would indicate that the camp is artificial while the outside space is not.

This is partly enabled by learning processes of participants and camp organisers. The evidence from the cases discussed here suggests that learning processes take place between different protest camps, sometimes across national boundaries. Such learning processes have led to an increasingly successful use of the tool of protest camping, certainly in the British context as exemplified in the climate camp movement. As I have indicated, the success itself brings new challenges, namely a tendency of institutionalisation.

The antagonism as exception describes an ontologically different status of the space of the camp, either as more real and authentic, or as less real and more artificial than the status quo. This is indeed Agamben’s notion of the camp as the nomos of modernity: the camp is the authentic political space of modernity, the real reflection of social relations, while the status quo as we perceive it is merely artificial. Protest camps seem to succeed as antagonistic spaces only in so far as they manage to resist the challenge to be understood as ontologically different to the status quo. Indeed this balancing act might be an indication of what Foucault’s (1967) calls heterotopias. Political successful protest camps seem to mirror the status quo. Re-created ‘mirror’ images of the status-quo, they operate as antagonistic on the same ontological plane as the status quo, “a simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.” (Foucault 1967, p.3)

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