ABSTRACT

This essay identifies anxious assemblages as a powerful rhetorical strategy used by organizers of the 2014 Flood Wall Street protest in New York City’s financial district. Anxious assemblages may disrupt the reduction of protest to acts of individual expression while promoting intra-movement solidarity. Drawing together literatures about assemblages and anxiety, I show how circulating signs and images on social media can propel protests that repeat and modulate pre-existing expressions of anxiety. I then use visual and textual methods to demonstrate how Flood Wall Street emerged from a Twitter campaign to transform protestors into a flood or bodies that predicted global climate chaos and spurred participants’ ongoing agitation against the causes of climate change. This essay provides an important analytical tool for analyzing the repetitive and collective tactics now popular among climate justice organizations, explaining how they promote intragroup solidarity and elicit further agitation.

摘要

这篇文章将焦虑的集合视为 2014 年纽约市金融区华尔街洪水抗议活动的组织者所使用的一种强有力的修辞策略。焦虑的集会可能会在促进运动内部团结的同时破坏将抗议减少为个人表达行为。我将关于聚集和焦虑的文献汇集在一起​​，展示了社交媒体上传播的标志和图像如何推动重复和调节预先存在的焦虑表达的抗议活动。然后，我使用视觉和文本方法来演示洪水华尔街如何从 Twitter 运动中脱颖而出，将抗议者变成洪水或预测全球气候混乱的身体，并激发参与者对气候变化原因的持续鼓动。