英文摘要 |
Contemporary critical discourses on things are on the rise, among which many endeavors are spent on exploring the relationship between “things” and “democracy.” Concepts, such as “thing-oriented democracy,” “parliament of things,” “the materialist theory of democracy,” have been ardently proposed by critics one after another in efforts to create the conceptual slippage between “the assembly” and “the assemblage,” and the affective linkage between the human and the non-human. This article attempts to follow these tendencies by focusing on the things of protest in the Sunflower Occupy the Legislative Yuan Movement that took place in spring 2014 in Taiwan to map out the transforming possibilities of these protest things from the “molar” to the “molecular,” from their centralized management, distribution, classification and archivation to their disruptive forces of becoming and radical equality when de-territorialized as the molecular movement of a “thing-event.” The present article tries to initiate disagreements with the concepts of “parliament of things,” “democracy of things,” and so forth on the one hand, and to unfold on the other hand the politics of aesthetics of the Sunflower Occupy the Legislative Yuan Movement as a radical rethinking of “democracy” and “equality.” This article is divided into four parts. Part I takes the internet auction of a so-called “Sweat Smell Democracy T-shirt” as a point of departure to explore the continuous transformation from the “idea” of “Defending Democracy” to the “embodiment” of “Sweat Smell Democracy” in light of the witty use of “defending” and “sweat smell” as homonyms in Chinese, together with the analysis of the T-shirt as both the “writing surface” and the “bodily interface” of the movement. Part II takes a line of flight from the protest T-shirt as a “molar” entity of a material-form to a “molecular” movement of “sweat smell.” The “fiber” theorized by Gilles Deleuze is adopted here to map out how the absorptive materiality of cotton cloth is transformed into the “material-movement” of the cotton yard fiber, how the Deleuzian “fiber” is further evolved into the thinking of border connection, creativity and becoming, and how the Sunflower Occupy the Legislative Yuan Movement can be radicalized as the molecular becoming of “fiber network.” The “Sweat Smell Democracy T-shirt” can thus be approached from the “writing surface” of movement slogans, the “bodily interface” of movement participation, and ultimately to the “becoming-fiber” of the movement itself. Part III returns to the central concern of the article—the relation between “things” and “democracy”— by bringing in the critical discourses on “parliament of things” by Bruno Latour and on the “materialist theory of democracy” by Jane Bennett, and discuss respectively their contributions and limitations. Part IV takes the politically empowered concept of “precarious assemblage” proposed by Judith Butler to radicalize the “materialist theory of democracy” as the “precarious thing theory of democracy” (again “materialist” and “precarious thing” are homonyms in Chinese). Butler’s concepts will further be connected with Zhuang-zi’s “'Blowing the myriad differences” and “Having affect without forms,” together with Baruch Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s concept of “affect,” to make “bodily vulnerability” as the radical presupposition of equality— humans and nonhuman are all involved in the relational network of affectivity; each has the capacity to affect, to be affected, and to become. In light of this radical presupposition, the Sunflower Occupy the Legislative Yuan Movement in Taiwan will thus be explored as a movement endowed with the ultimate potential for “Democratic Equality.” |