15. Playing with politics: Memory, orientation, and tactility

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is how playfulness can be a constitutive part of political activism. Analyzing the anti-austerity demonstrations in London in 2011, Hind looks at the carnivalesque and ludic qualities during the March for the Alternative, which attracted over 250,000 protesters. One of the highlights of this march was a giant Trojan horse that people carried with them. In Hind’s analysis, ludic political interventions such as the Trojan horse constitute a playful, material, and performative relationship between digital technologies and embodied political actions. Hind draws attention to the fact that political events are not solely human-driven, but that technologies form an intrinsic part of how they unfold. Through a reading of Stiegler, he examines the material and affective dynamics of contemporary protest events.