Economy and Society Demonstrations

This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester] On: 16 March 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 915545543] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Economy and Society Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713685159 Demonstrations: sites and sights of direct action Andrew Barry To cite this Article Barry, Andrew(1999) 'Demonstrations: sites and sights of direct action', Economy and Society, 28: 1, 75 — 94 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03085149900000025 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085149900000025 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Economy and Soriety Yolume 28 Number I February 1999: 75-94 Demonstrations: sites and sights of direct action Andrew Barry Abstract The term demonstration refers both to political and to scientific and technical activity. On the one hand, a demonstration is a public political protest. On the other hand, the conduct of a demonstration is, in a scientific or technical context, a matter of witnessing a natural phenomenon or a technological possibility. The subject of this paper is the conduct of direct action against the construction of the Newbury bypass and the development of the A30 trunk road in Devon. The paper argues that such actions can be understood as demonstrations in the technical as much as in the political sense. In doing so, the paper draws attention to the technical and ethical practices involved in the conduct of a demonstration. Keywords: demonstration; witnessing; environment; politics; science; ethics. Along with about 50 protestors and 300 security, contractors and police, there were maybe 20-30 people observing the protest and taking some record. A crew from the local independent TV company Meridian who turned up early along with a photographer working for the magazine of the New York Times; one or two freelance photographers hoping something might happen; an observer from Friends of the Earth as well as several independent legal observers working on behalf of the protestors; police photographers and a video cameraman and various cameramen belonging to the private security firm (with yellow hard hats) who were working on behalf of the contractors; a BBC crew with a reporter (Margaret Gilmore) who arrived rather late in the day and approached me for an interview after one protestor fell off a tree and had to be taken to hospital. The video crew from Oxford who had given me a lift out to the site from the station. I had my notebook and my camera. In Downloaded By: [The University of Manchester] At: 12:28 16 March 2010 addition the police were in radio contact with each other and others on all Andrew Barry, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW El: +I223 328615. Copyright O Routledge 1999 0308-5 147 76 Economy and Society sides carried mobile telephones. Many of the protestors' camps were linked together by radio. (From my diary. On the site of the Newbury bypass, Berkshire, 23 January 1996 ) In his account of 'the structural transformation of the public sphere', Jurgen Habermas presents us with a picture of decline. For Habermas, the commer- cialization of the media and the growing importance of both scientific and technological research and technocratic argument in the deliberations of the state have led to a corrosion of the public sphere's critical potential. At a more abstract level, the life-world of the citizen has been colonized by the system- world of science, technology and bureaucracy. It is, in these circumstances, increasingly difficult to articulate matters which are of real significance to the public in public. As he wrote elsewhere during the same period: 'The scientiza- tion of politics is not yet a reality, but it is a real tendency for which there is evi- dence' (Habermas l97 l : 62). Despite its importance to his analysis, however, Habermas's concern with technology has not figured centrally in recent debates on the public sphere in social theory. Paralleling the movement of Habermas's own work in the 1970s and 1980s critics have focused primarily on the unitary nature of his model of the public sphere, his failure to interrogate the historical constitution of the distinction between the public and the private, and his assumption that it was both desirable and necessary, and possible in principle, to overcome difference through consensus. Habermas's distinction between science and technology, on the one hand, and the public sphere, on the other, has not been directly engaged with, although it has been taken up and re-worked in the social theories of Beck and Giddens (Goldblatt 1996). This paper, following Habermas, is also concerned with the relation between technology and public sphere. But the question I want to address is not whether science and technology have stifled the development of a critical public sphere, or have colonized the life-world, but a different question, which cuts across the distinction between expert science and non-expert experience, and between technology and the public sphere - namely, how and where is it possible to tell the truth in public today? In exploring these questions this paper focuses on the idea of a demonstration, and the conduct of demonstrators. Today, it is common- place to think of a demonstrator as a political actor: a protestor against an injus- tice, the breaking of a promise, a threat (or the absence) of violence or an Downloaded By: [The University of Manchester] At: 12:28 16 March 2010 intolerable situation. Demonstrators, in this sense, are markers of the unaccept- ability of another's actions; expressions of whether the exercise of power should be limited, or intensified. They claim to display that subjects have a stake in government. This political sense of the term emerged the nineteenth century in connection with the Chartists and the revolutions of 1848, a manifestation of the emergence of the masses as a political subject (cf. Foucault 1991). But the notion of demonstration also has an earlier historical sense. In the Andrew Barry: Demonstrations 77 Middle Ages the demonstrator had a particular function in the anatomy lecture theatre. He pointed out the feature of the body which was being shown and about which the lecturer was speaking. The demonstrator made visible to the audience the object of which the lecturer spoke, and thereby made a significant contribution to the production and dissemination of anatomical knowledge in public.1 To be in the presence of a demonstration was a matter of witnessing a technical practice. The truth of the lecturer's knowledge was established through observing a demonstration. This sense of term still exists, in some form, today. In the university science laboratory, a demonstrator is one (usually a graduate student) who assists undergraduates in their practical classes, pointing out the objects they are expected to discover and understand. The truths of laboratory science are proved to the novice, in part, through demonstration. In the twenti- eth century the technical meaning of the demonstrator and the demonstration acquired a further sense. If the older scientific or mathematical notion of demonstration implies proof, the idea of the demo implies provisionality. A demo model is a display of the possibility of a real object, rather than its actualization. It is a way of showing what can or might be done. Demonstration, whether it is understood in a technical or a political sense, is, or can be made to be, a political matter. On the one hand, because there is a politics of who can, and who should be allowed and trusted to witness a demonstration - under what conditions and in what ways. Being a witness is to adopt an ethical ~tance.~As Stephen Shapin has argued, the development of 'science' in the seventeenth century involved an effort to regulate who could and who could not be properly called upon as witnesses to matters of fact about the natural world.3 On the other hand, public demonstration is political, because the telling of a truth in public can never be described as disinterested - it is always intended to have effects on, or challenge the minds, or affect the conduct of others. My account focuses on a particular story of demonstration. It concerns the conduct of direct action against the construction of roads in Britain in the mid- 1990~.~What is remarkable about the anti-road protests, I argue, is the absence of any well-developed ideological project, and the absence of a well-defined political constituency on which they are based. Indeed, the intended effect of the protests is as much a technical as a political one: to demonstrate a truth which it has been otherwise impossible to demonstrate in public by other means. The history of science, I argue, can inform our understanding of the contemporary art of politics.

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