Dissent

Holmes saw the dissent as a mechanism to advance and preserve arguments and as a pageant for wordplay. Dissents, for Holmes, occupied an interstitial space between law and non-law. The thought and theory of pragmatism allowed him to recreate the dissent as a stage for performative text, a place where signs and syntax could mimic the environment of the particular time and place and in so doing become, or strive to become, law. Holmes’s dissents were sites of aesthetic adaptation. The language of his dissents was acrobatic. It acted and reacted and called attention to itself. The more provocative and aesthetic the language, the more likely it was for future judges and commentators to return to that dissent to reconsider Holmes’s argument—the more likely, that is, that non-law might become law. In this sense, language for Holmes was not just a vehicle for law but also law itself. This paper argues that Holmes’s dissents both reflect and revise pragmatist philosophy and that the proliferation of dissents has to do with American pragmatism. Focusing on Lochner v. New York (1905), Abrams v. United States (1919), and Bartels v. Iowa (1923), this paper shows that Holmes’s dissents represent an aesthetic adaptation of pragmatism that allows Holmes’s writing to become memorable not just for the ideas it articulates, but also for the way in which it articulates those ideas.

""In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the "social web" (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers.

The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.

Contributors and Interviewees:
Shaina Anand, Chris Atton, Megan Boler, Axel Bruns, Jodi Dean, Ron J. Deibert, Deepa Fernandes, Amy Goodman, Brian Holmes, Hassan Ibrahim, Geert Lovink, Nathalie Magnan, Robert McChesney, Graham Meikle, Susan D. Moeller, Alessandra Renzi, Ricardo Rosas, Andréa Schmidt, Trebor Scholz, D. Travers Scott, R. Sophie Statzel, Stephen Turpin.

About the Editor

Megan Boler is a Professor in Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a graduate of the History of Consciouness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her other books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education and Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence. Her essays are published in such journals as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly.""

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.

As George W. Bush arrived and left the inauguration ceremony in January 2009, he was greeted with a chorus of boos, hisses, and chants. To be expected, the radical Right media machine depicted this as rudeness for the man and disrespect for the office. Yet here was someone who had turned his back on the American people, its constitution, and human rights for 8 years. His blatant indifference to antiwar protests (calling a half-million-strong street demonstration a “focus group”) was a synecdoche for the administration’s approach to dissent: ignore it officially. One could even say that he turned his back in betrayal before he ever entered office (by subverting the electoral process). Now he was leaving the way he came in—back turned—and the pent-up sentiment from day one could be released en masse. But what left that day, and what replaced it? What will be the legacy of the Bush Face?

Biopolitics and its different peripheral disciplines have been my research interest for three years now. I demonstrated a part of this research last year during the third installment of the Conference for Applied Ethics, in Kolozsvár, the conference dealing with the several possible approaches to bioethics and this year during the fourth installment I demonstrated another part of this same ongoing research, this year the conference having the context of different approaches to dissention, ethos and bureaucratic power. Last year I spoke about the ancient greek roots of biopolitics, this year of legal administration of „bare life”.

"No other social movement of this generation has captured the imagination and attention of the nation like the Occupy Wall Street action began in October 2011. From its beginning in the magazine, Adbusters, OWS and its offshoots in cities across the country have grappled with the issue of image and how these images came to frame the movement.  How did certain images or scenes come to stand for or frame the movement? Who provided these and why did these images has come to dominate the average citizen’s concept of the meaning and mission of Occupy?
 
This presentation will look at how cinematic media, which I broadly define to include broadcast news, local and national, commercial advertizing, film and television programs, framed and represented OWS. I will analyze the dominant moving images to unpack the naturalized assumptions about protest and dissent to ask questions about the ideological positions of both critics of the movement and its participants. I will ask if the images used by the forces of State repression are that far apart from the images used by the forces of political resistance. The convergences and divergences provide productive tensions through which to explore how the ideas of neoliberalism are presented in both camps.
 
I will use research on youth culture, branding, and protest movements in addition to more traditional film, video, and television theory to analyze both current and past depictions of social protest so as to interrogate the actions of those involved. For those for or against protest, disseminating visual representations and narratives became a strategy designed to magnify or mitigate the impact of said protest. By examining the striking similarities in the images used by both camps, we will ask if protest can be figured on its own terms if it utilizes the same images as those used by representatives of official positions of government and social elites to frame protest. Is it possible for protest movements to produce a visual narrative that is not recuperated from above to elicit disapproval from below if they are to build a wider, more inclusive movement of workers, students and the underclasses in the future? Must they counter the images created by the forces of hegemony with images of their own?

"

This book examines a wide range of dissident practices, from street protests to political poetry, in an attempt to demonstrate that they are becoming an increasingly important aspect of global politics. The author draws on several case studies, including an analysis of the events that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The theoretical discussions focus on how people influence the course of politics at a time when boundaries between domestic and international spheres are blurring.

This study extends and refines earlier hypotheses about the constructive potential of influences "from below" on questions of democratization and unification in Korea. It carefully distinguishes "direct action" from other forms of political action and suggests that nonviolent direct action, fomented in the discourse of civil society, offers greater potential for constructive change than does "routine" political action, which operates within a more circumscribed institutional framework and yields more predictable and more limited results.