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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Political Intelligibility and the Performative Force of Assembly Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62t2t12z Author Liou, Stacey Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Political Intelligibility and the Performative Force of Assembly DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Political Science by Stacey Liou Dissertation Committee: Professor Kevin Olson, Chair Professor Simone Chambers Associate Professor Keith Topper © 2020 Stacey Liou DEDICATION To Ryan sine non qua ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii VITA vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 How Materiality Matters 21 CHAPTER 2 Collectivity as Performative Force 51 CHAPTER 3 Publicity and the Disorders of Desire 93 CHAPTER 4 Affect and Horizons of Concern 128 CONCLUSION 164 BIBLIOGRAPHY 170 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been waiting a long time for this opportunity to acknowledge the generosity, guidance and company of friends, colleagues and family. A life spent between books and screen can be lonely, and I’m lucky that you all have made it richer and more rewarding for your presence. My first thanks are to Kevin Olson, Simone Chambers and Keith Topper. Kevin, Simone and Keith have challenged me to think coherently, precisely and creatively, and my intellectual development results in no small part from their tireless efforts in this regard. They model a form of scholarship committed to thoughtful, lively and fun conversation, and I only hope to follow the examples they have set. Special thanks to Kevin Olson, whose faith in my abilities as a scholar has kept me going in uncertain times. He has championed me throughout this process while always allowing me my intellectual freedom. I thank also Daniel Brunstetter, Louis DeSipio, Bernie Grofman, Heidi Hardt, Jeffrey Kopstein, Erin Lockwood, Mary McThomas, Walter Nicholls, Davin Phoenix, Michael Tesler, Samantha Vortherms and Carole Uhlaner, who in different ways have pressed and supported me in my time here. Claudia Cheffs, Tomas Figueroa, Andrew Hallak and Liz Nguyen do the daily work that makes this life possible, and they do so with smiles and cool heads. Thank you also to David Blaney, J. J. Rodriguez and Sonita Sarker, who from the beginning encouraged me to ask critical questions and sit with the discomfort of questions unanswered. Because virtue calls, too, for cakes and ale, let me thank Hannah Alarian, Semassa Boko, John Emery, Ben Hoyt, Mary Anne Mendoza, Robert Nyenhuis, Graham Odell, Kevin Pham and Anna Setyaeva. I am especially grateful for the friendship of Maneesh Arora, Pernilla Johansson, Hannah Kim and Chungjae Lee, whose company and laughter have sustained me. iv Grad school couldn’t have been half as enjoyable without our easy conversations, from DTF to walks around Aldrich. Thank you to May Liou, whose energy and strength are paralleled only by the sacrifices she has made for me to be able to choose this life; and to Connie and Caroline Liou, whose curiosity, playfulness and boundless reinvention inspire me to keep learning and exploring. I am also grateful for Patti and Tom Sauchelli, who have embraced me without reservation. And, thank you to Abi, whose trust and uncomplicated love remain with me. My most profound thanks go to Ryan Sauchelli. Ryan’s steady love and companionship, his humor, patience and open mind, continue to carry me through my highs and lows. Life with you will never grow old. v VITA Stacey Liou ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2020 - Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Florida EDUCATION 2010 B.A., Macalester College Political Science and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies 2017 M.A., University of California, Irvine Political Science 2020 Ph.D., University of California, Irvine Political Science FIELD OF STUDY Political Theory PUBLICATIONS Chungjae Lee and Stacey Liou, “Inverted Founding: Emperor Organ Theory, Constitutionalism, and Koku-min,” European Journal of Political Theory. doi: 10.1177/1474885119882835. Stacey Liou, “Unspoken Insurgencies: Interpretive Publics in Contentious Politics,” Political Theory vol. 45, no. 3 (2017): 342-361. Pernilla Johansson and Stacey Liou, “Public Spheres on the Move: The Embodied Deliberation of Cycling in Los Angeles,” Space & Polity vol. 21, no. 1 (2017): 59-74. vi ABSTRACT Intelligibility and the Performative Force of Assembly by Stacey Liou Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Irvine, 2020 Professor Kevin Olson, Chair This study examines the conditions of political intelligibility for popular assembly. What are the normative constraints by which some forms of public gathering can appear politically intelligible while others cannot? I investigate this question by conceptualizing what I call the force of assembly. I argue that there is no essential form of political assembly. Instead, a politically intelligible assembly is a performative effect of gathering under and according to compulsory norms whose intersecting logics operate materially, collectively and affectively; these are the logics by which public meanings about assembly are created. An assembly’s political intelligibility rests on its perceived compliance with these compulsory norms. Materially, people on the streets may make political claims, but the conditions of their embodied presence in public space shape the gathering’s political intelligibility, embodying public meanings that exceed discursive articulation. Collectively, a gathering associated with a collective identity appears to be the work of an intelligible political actor. Affectively, the moods, emotions and feelings connected with an assembly can enable or obscure its political intelligibility. However, materially, collectively and affectively generated meanings do not vii result solely from the actions of those gathered on the streets. An assembly’s performative force also depends integrally upon public audiences attending to and interpreting it. I advance this theoretical argument by analyzing two instances of public gathering in contemporary Los Angeles history, one for many audiences politically intelligible and the other not: the 1994 anti- Proposition 187 march to City Hall and the 1992 Uprising / Riots. This study seeks to contribute to radical democratic theories of collective political action, offering a more complex and empirically grounded account of the multidimensional channels by which moments of collective political action can carry normative force as political assemblies. My hope is that examining the conditions of possibility for intelligible popular action can illuminate the contingencies of our social meanings and practices and contribute to a world where different forms of worldmaking can flourish. viii INTRODUCTION There is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear. – E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Take the following scene from the afternoon of April 29, 1992.1 At a liquor store at the corner of Florence and Dalton Avenues in South Central Los Angeles, a group of five young men grabs a few bottles of beer and moves to leave without paying.2 One of them strikes the shopkeeper over the head with a bottle: “This is for Rodney King!” Just an hour earlier, four officers from the Los Angeles Police Department were acquitted on all charges of using excessive force in their savage beating of Black motorist Rodney King.3 1 The following account is drawn from various sources, including “25 Years after the L.A. Riots: An Oral History,” LA Weekly, April 26, 2017; Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD (New York: Random House); Timothy Goldman, “Los Angeles Riots (Part I of V),” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8L1jcl0K70, accessed May 3, 2018; Angel Jennings and Matt Hamilton, “At the corner of Florence and Normandie, marking causes of L.A. riots,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2017; Penelope McMillan, “Riot Aftermath: After First Moments, Cameraman Lost Empathy With Rioters,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1992; Sylvester Monroe, “Burn, baby, burn: What I saw as a black journalist covering the L.A. riots 25 years ago,” Washington Post, April 28, 2017; David Whitman, “The Untold Story of the LA Riot,” U.S. News, May 23, 1993. 2 South Central is a geographically large area of Los Angeles that does not correspond exactly with today’s formal municipal boundaries (e.g., city district lines or census tracts). Though the Los Angeles City Council in 2003 voted to rename this neighborhood South Los Angeles, at the time of the events it was commonly referred to as South Central (Los Angeles). Because the events described here occurred before this change, I retain the language of South Central. 3 I capitalize Black because it denotes a cultural identity. Joel Olson writes that white is strictly a political category while Black is a political category as well as a cultural identity, so “the two terms are not symmetrical.” Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xix. This capitalization has acquired broader popular currency following the New York 1 One block east of the liquor store, a young man swings a baseball bat at the windshield of a Cadillac and gives chase. Police officers arrest him on a nearby residential street as a crowd assembles around them; some begin chanting, “Rodney King, Rodney King, Rodney King” as a TV crew arrives. As similar encounters and arrests are made in the neighborhood, an estimated 100-200 people gather on streets and sidewalks to watch, many shouting, yelling at and cursing the police officers and some beginning to throw rocks and other objects at them.