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Wednesday 6th December 2006 1:28 pm
Cathy Davidson on “Performing Civic Engagement”
Civic engagement comes in many forms and not all of them have to do with voting booths.
Civic engagement comes in many forms and not all of them have to do with voting booths. Activists and protestors, for example, are not necessarily voters but they certainly contribute to civic engagement. Similarly with online civic engagements (such as U Tubing a politician’s incriminating remarks) or protests within games. These, too, are forms of civic engagement.
So, for example: yes it is a form of protest to immolate a character one has carefully and patiently constructed in game play since others who are playing the game and who appreciate what that action means will read it as a form of protest. Does that form of protest translate into action outside the game space? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But then a Buddhist priest’s self-immolation in protest on the Capitol steps (you name the capitol) also may or may not lead to other civic actions.
The performativity of even the most dramatic protest is not necessarily guaranteed to have results, nor is it sure to have the result the protestor wished (i.e. backlash, unexpected consequences, apathy, repression, etc., all being forces that contribute to the enactment and efficacy of civic actions in response to the original protest). Then again, neither is voting necessarily tied, in any simple fashion, to results ("result" itself being a quite problematic concept) in a representative democracy. One’s vote does not guarantee a result. Even if one’s candidate wins, one cannot assure agreement with every action that candidate takes.
Perhaps it is useful to recast this question not as an either/or but as a continuum of civic actions, all with different kinds of performative, representative, representational, affective, and sometimes effective powers.
Category: Civic-Engagement
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