The social meaning of superglue: new sensibilities and political prac...

In this presentation I am exploring how activists’ practices seem to be driven by a different sensibility which refuses “instrumentalist rationalities” (Marcuse 1972:60) common to our social lives. I draw on my doctoral project in which I examine current controversies which arise in protest situations of new social eco-movements. Social eco-movements advocate for effective climate actions by governments to prevent the exceeding of tipping points in the climate system. Therefore they use methods of civil disobedience to gain attention for the urgent need of different solution to business as usual. For Marcuse (2017 [1977]: 57) ecology is one of the forces which could “fight against the old world”.

Starting with this notion I am examining the situation of new social eco-movements in an engaged ethnographic approach (Juris/Khasnabish 2013) to do situational analyses (Clarke et al. 2018). The data is produced through interviews with activists, participatory observations during blockades and includes extant visual and narrative discourse materials within the situation.

The interruption of the daily routine, such as driving to work, provokes aggressive responds by the opponents of this protest practices: As verbal attacks in comments on social media and as assaults during protests on the streets. While activists are deemed to be unemployed and a burden to the society, the car drivers got stuck are seen as hardworking and kept from their duty. These recalcitrant protest acts seem to challenge basic instrumentalist notions of how subjects relate to themselves and their position within capitalist societies. 

Here, Marcuse’s (1969) notion of new sensibilities is applied as theoretical framework to capture transformations of norms, values and needs. Can the activists’ political practices be considered as claims of “aesthetic needs [that] have their own social content” (ibid.: 27)? Descriptions of activists’ interpretations and constitutions of reality are helpful to understand new sensibilities.