What Demonstrations Are, and What Demonstrations Mean (REVISED)

What is a demonstration? In the midst of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, can we summon up any general understanding of what it is to demonstrate: what is the point of it as a political activity and why do the authorities often seem to be angered or threatened by it? In the past 50 years, questions like this have focused mainly on civil disobedience. But demonstrating as such also deserves our attention. Is it just speech? What sort of speech act is involved — an appeal, a policy proposal, the expression of a grievance, a demand, an admonition, a threat…? A demonstration is not just a speech act and it is not only expressive. It has its own rituals, its dramatics, and its presence and visibility as a public practice. Can anything useful be said about it at an abstract level? I think it can. A demonstration makes a fuss; it puts something on display; it refuses effacement; it won’t calm down; it presents political demands with large numbers of people attached to them (“I Am A Man!”); and it makes it hard for people to look away. A demonstration seeks to disrupt ordinary life and to rivet public attention on a particular set of grievances. In some dramatic cases, it sounds a warning that intimates an upending of business-as-usual in politics. That is why the accommodation of protests in a mature political system is no easy matter.