ABSTRACT
While, for example, the actual practice of political protest is a contextdependent, micro-level incident, the practice also expresses a contexttranscending normative stance. As actual performance, the practice engages the participants in a certain way of doing things, while it also represents an image of how a type of practice should be carried out. Furthermore, through forms of documenting the protest, incorporating certain elements or artefacts in the protest practices, etc., participants create and establish a ‘medially conveyed level accessible to observation and interpretation’ (Soeffner 2009: 215). At least some types of protest practices are not routine activities in the sense of conventions or regularities. While certain elements of protest can be characterised ‘in terms of rules’, as ‘common activities’, as ‘things people typically or regularly do’ and as activities that ‘suggest an element of conventionality’ (Bridges 2014: 282), other elements and types of protest are performed in order to open up the conventional level of ‘the way in which things are usually done’ to critique – they express a ‘discrepancy’ between how things are and how things could be (see Browne, Chapter 3 of this volume).1 Protest practices, in this sense, are bodily expressions of normative claims. They are bodily expressions of how things should be, or, as Judith Butler outlines: in the course of protest practices, the body enacts, ‘by the embodied form of the gathering, a claim to the political’ (Butler 2015: 18). Political practices, such as protest practices, are practices of creativity and critique. They hint at the ‘prospects of change in light of the distinction between the potential and the actual’ (see Browne, Chapter 3); they are manifestations of ‘moments of praxis that challenge, shift, and destabilise extant social order’ (see Alkemeyer et al., Chapter 5). As will be discussed in this chapter, political practices can manifest themselves in different forms and numerous variations. At the same time, they convey an image of a practice that includes interrelated signs and rules that turn the single performance into a certain ‘way of doing things’, into an instance of a type of practice. Practices can be characterised as bearers of a ‘generalized image’ (Eisenstein 1993: 33) of a certain practice. Furthermore, through forms of documentation, these images are captured in a certain way. Photographic images or audiovisual documentations of practices diffuse from the local to the global scale. Through the production and reproduction of visual forms of documentation of practices, agents are able to visualise the ‘transnational circulation of cultural practices’ (Kozol 2014: 216). While documenting a singular encounter, visual forms of documenting protest practices are also able to capture ‘transnational connectivities’ (ibid.). In the context of protest practices, photographs – as well as other forms of visual documentation – not only represent interpretations of practice. According to Soeffner, the idea that photographs represent interpretations
must be expanded to include the insight that these interpretations occur in accordance with a catalogue of rules and on their own achieve typicalising concentrations of perceptions that not only ‘project’ the latter ‘into an
image’, but also make them readable through the specific representation in a medium.
