The (Anonymous) Face of Politics to Come
摘要
This chapter demonstrates how the three dynamics of receptivity, responsivity, and pluralist judgment come together to animate contemporary agonistic democracy, which I conceptualize as “dividual direct action.” I examine the 2011 exploits of Anonymous hacktivism in solidarity with Chelsea Manning following her trove of disclosures to WikiLeaks. I stage a dialog between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the political protest scholars Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly to analyze Anonymous hacktivism as digitally-mediated contentious politics. Here, I show how the gaily provocative and agonistic thymos of these anonymous trolls for lulz provided an affective adhesion that allowed confronting corporate and state agents with performative demands for the right to the unfettered circulation of information, political and corporate accountability, and the freedom to assemble in agonistic contestation online and IRL (in real life). In the memetic persona that Anons fashioned, anonymity and agonism are twinned principles, the one driving the other. In the absence of exchanges of recognition of identity, what bound actors was a shared sense that something important was being done.