Are Protests Acts of Communication?

Originally published on New York City Sophist

Debating over the value and limits of the recent protests against police violence toward black people in the United States usually centers around the question of what an appropriate protest looks like.

As a communication scholar and a teacher of rhetoric, I have been thinking a lot about how to define a protest in my field. To me, it seems obvious that a protest is communicative; that is an act of communication. But to many others, a protest is outside of the realm of communication - it is disruptive and violent.

Here I run through both interpretations of protests to see what happens when we accept each definition. From the point of view of someone who studies rhetoric, it is not important to determine which definition is true. It is much more important to see what kind of world of meaning we can create and live in if we accept the definition.

Here are some things to consider when you think about the role protests serve in a society.

Case 1: Protests are not communication.

We can take this definition of protests in two different ways. The first is the read that a protest is some kind of error, some problem, some breakdown in things. The error is a problem that needs to be repaired. The protest is the evidence that something has gone wrong with the normal way we should address and solve problems.

This read normalizes the status quo - whatever the governmental system is for resolving the issue (in this case, police violence against and murder of black people in custody). It is a recognition that the status quo isn’t working, but not a recognition that the status quo should change. It focuses on the rhetoric of repair. The normalization of our current system of disputation, argument, discourse, problem-solving, you name it means that ideologically it appears to be “normal” or even “the best.” Neither of the terms in scare quotes need evidence or support in this case, because of the effects of normalizing how we “do things in this country.”

Articulations of this definition can come from any political view I think, and it can even have some wild variations, i.e. “If Donald Trump wasn’t in office this wouldn’t be happening!” Such wishful statements can be, rightfully in my view, critiqued as an incredibly narrow and selfish read of the protest, not providing the protest enough shared interpretive space with your understanding. Any interpretation of an event should be careful not to carve out more of the event than they present in order to make the interpretation palatable.

We can go broader and say protests are not communicative; they represent the loss of communication. This interpretation is by far the most dangerous, as ideologically we assume one of the factors of being human is the ability and desire to communicate. Articulating that the protest is a loss of the protesters’ ability to communicate is a way to divide them from humanity, and indicate they are sub or non human. This is why police beatings of protesters are not reacted to with anger and horror by people - they might hold the view that the person being beaten isn’t a fellow human being, because what kind of people protest?

The other way that the “not communicative” read is dangerous is that it places events outside of their interpretation to the point where they become unmalleable - we can mold, shape, and bend what they mean. This means that certain events fall outside of the realm of interpretation - and if people try to make them make sense, they find it incredibly difficult. Their interlocutors laugh and respond with head shaking. They see the attempt to “explain” to be foolish in the face of “reality.” It is “obvious” what the protests are, etc.

It is incredibly important that in any interpretation of events we offer - or art or literature for that matter - that space in the interpretation is reserved for correction in case we get it wrong. I know, every interpretation is wrong, sure. But the goal of interpretation is not to be right. It is to provide insight. So every interpretation builds on every other one, and must allow for space for the corrective to find a handhold. Adversarial rhetoric might be what our courts are based on, and it *might* work well for them, but it doesn’t work well in things like interpretation.

A very good example of this comes from military rhetoric where with great regularity we learn that a foreign government has been “sent a message” in the form of multiple cruise missiles impacting their military bases, airstrikes from fighter jets, or other ordinance. This conflation of material and physical violence with communication is a deliberate attempt to indicate that communication is not up for interpretation, that messages are clear when they are direct and forceful, and that the sender is serious and unwavering. This is not a model for communication at all, for many reasons, one of the most important being that there’s incredible difficulty in rolling back your message if you happen to be wrong, change your mind, or think differently about what you’d like your interlocutor to believe or do - in short, be human.

The call for “direct action” also suffers from this same problem, placing communication outside of reality which requires no interpretation, is clear, obvious, direct, and requires symmetry in order for there to be justice. Both “direct action” and “protests are riots” are interpretations, no question. They are interpretations that try to expel (perhaps excommunicate is a better word here?) the idea that they could be refuted, could be incorrect, could change upon the arrival of additional information, facts, understanding, etc. The point here is that the desire to cut out the sometimes frustrating notion of interpretation cuts out the most powerful and useful parts of it, namely the addition of other ways of seeing which I believe is part of the central argument as to why democracy is important: Personal experiences are evidence, and personal experiences are in fact, interpretations of events delivered communicatively. No way out. No shortcuts, even if you mean well. It’s always best to have the handhold for response. Even “there isn’t time for a conversation” invites a response, so this isn’t that hard to do.

When people say that protests and protesters are “fed up with talk” or “the time for talk is over” we can understand this as saying “communication is a limited and narrow position to take versus reality” or the (better) way, “our political ways of enacting communication have failed and need to be replaced.” But once you are here, you are very far away from the understanding of “not communication.” You sort of have to abandon the idea that protests are not communicative once you argue that it’s a breakdown in the old methods.

Case 2: Protests are a form of communication

This interpretation posits that the protests are done in order to communicate, to present an argument or a claim of some kind about whatever event sparked the protest. The power of this interpretation comes from the inability - not incapacity - of protests to “say what they are about.” The American media has great fun making fun of protesters, interviewing whoever will come over to the microphone to speak with them about the protest. Journalists, unaware of and probably uncaring about concerns of self-reporting, sample size, and the like, allow the people who are either crazy enough or weird enough to want to be on television during a protest to speak for the entire protest. The media generally strategically lay these interviews next to one another like you would the pieces of a puzzle for a child to show them that the pieces just don’t fit together, and perhaps something else should be tried. Presenting multiple protesters voluntary statements as to what the protest is about side by side to look for a rubric of “consistency” is not going to do anything but forward the interpretation to the viewer that the protests - composed of protesters - is as incoherent as they are.

Instead, we can celebrate protests as communicative not through consistency, but through their symbolic power. What does it mean that thousands turned up without organization to march together? What does it mean that they all took the time and resources to make signs? What do the chants mean?

We can go more deeper and more personal: Do I see myself as one of these people? Should I be out there? Is that my police department acting this way? I recognize that shop! I used to go there! (it looks so different now).

We can go broader: Under what conditions would I march? What would it mean if they didn’t choose to do this? What does it mean that they did? Why now? Is this justified? Is it ever justified? Why don’t they just rely on their elected officials, and petition them? (that one is in memory of my grandmother’s chosen form of activism for literally anything that bothered her).

Protests, by their very existence, demand. They demand an interpretation, and depending on how threatened we are by their existence, we will articulate that demand in relation to our ideology. We won’t hesitate long enough at the point of encounter to really open up the idea of the protest as a communicator, where it is in conversation with us. But maybe that’s for a much later point in rhetorical theorizing about political action. We struggle a ton with the relationship between the individual and the group (all this conversation about apples as police officers) and cannot fathom the idea that a group, a belief, an ideological commitment can speak, and when it does it compels acquiescence before understanding, every time. To resist that is quite an effort, and often relies on an accidental combination of events or moments. Perhaps we can say that protests communicate a nexus of recognition that is so powerful, so overwhelming that it must be expressed and offered this way. After all, it is against the message of ideology, which has no articulation that can be responded to with reason, facts, or evidence.

If we take seriously that the protest is communication, we normalize it as a part of politics. It’s not opposed to, or the lack thereof, but a form of politics. This might reduce the power i ascribed to protesting in the last paragraph, but it also might provide protesting a powerful way to be seen on a spectrum with other political modes. Perhaps the automatic placing of it on a spectrum (which I just did and am not going to edit out) is the problem, because it immediately suggests good to bad, better to best. We don’t want that; we’d like voting and protest to be equally legitimate and equally available based on conditions and circumstances that we face in the political. But to do that, we have to say “protests are a form of communication.”

The symbolic factor of the protest is only available if protests are communicative. As we all know from our own lived experience, communication does not require a person, language, or even the presence of other people - we interpret the world around us communicatively, even when we do something as simple as take a walk (eg: “I wonder why that person parked that way?”) We are always seeking motives. If we find the idea “this is not communicative” we stop asking questions and stop engaging. The protest as a symbol is something that has a lot of play, and might be one of the best ways you can define a protest. It’s because of the immense possibilities of the point of the protest, not because it limits it or stabilizes it. The irony of “this is symbolic” is that it appears to be a reduction or refinement in meaning but it opens up a much larger area of interpretation and meaning that you could get with any other form of definition (even “communication”).

One of the first things that comes to mind is the notion that the protests are disruptive and destructive. They block traffic; they break things; they bring out the police in force; they hurt the ability for normal stuff to happen. This can be seen as a problem, or an attack on society. But as a symbol, this could be seen as the perspective that the protesters deal with daily. The disruption and destruction is their normal life. They present the world from their point of view to us through the act of protest.

Another way to define it: The protest opens up space to reconsider by disrupting the regular and normal. People begin to reflect on the meaning of their daily tasks, and how much they like going out on particular nights, being able to drive here or there, or what have you. They see the protest as the symbol, in a backwards way, of something that is devastating to their normal lives. The protest stands symbolically for the thing that ruins the protesters’ lives. This disruption then becomes something that non-protesters must account for. Because of our ceaseless demand to chase after motives, we start to try to fill in the gap here, to name the disruption in a way that makes sense to both us and to the protesters, who are far too many to dismiss as un-united idiots, troublemakers, or what have you.

These are just two, but the work here is to prevent the symbolic from spinning out into interpretations that reinforce anti-communicative notions of protests. These are the biological or natural interpretations that are often essentialist, seeing the protest as an example of the failure of human society, eg “look at those idiots,” or the ever popular discounting the protest because it simply shows that we have no values in this country anymore. The hard work here is to get your opposition to accept that human minds are powerful and can make all sorts of judgments, and therefore can be changed. They chose to protest like this; it is not an animalistic reaction. They chose it because they think it means something. Now, let’s talk about what we think they might be trying to say here.