ABSTRACT
This chapter examines direct action environment activist group Extinction Rebellion’s (XR’s) Red Brigade actions as interventions that simultaneously evoke emotion and evade specific, semiotic representation. It examines this intentionally generalized evocation of sentiment as a response to the climate crisis, whose threat is widely dispersed, unevenly felt, and, yet, devastating. Emotion, in this instance, is not only a motivator for or a result of activist effort but it is also the central point of an intervention. Moreover, emotion here is manufactured through specific representational decisions at the same time that it is felt as viscerally real. In order to account for this complex relationship between emotion and representation in activism, the account places theorizations of protest within sociology and in dance/performance studies in conversation. Blending these approaches allows an investigation of the mechanisms through which justice interventions evince emotion in the interest of social change. To consider how protest events cultivate emotion, the argument extends this theorization by attending to an analytical system focused on the cultivation of emotion in the absence of psychological identification—and, thus, reflecting on concepts drawn from Sanskrit aesthetic theory: transient and durable states.
