“I have a scream” Enunciaciones disidentes en torno al 15M en España

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the first Grito Mudo or Silent Scream —a collective act of disobedience committed by the Indignados movement in Madrid´s Puerta del Sol Square in May 2011— as a glottopolitical scene. In this act, the self-summoned multitude remained silent for one minute just before midnight, when the High Court´s sentence declaring the gathering illegal was to become effective. This collective performance brings together different discursive forms (including language, silence and bodies) to conflictually challenge the normative regimes that place limits on how political participation and democracy are conceived. Glottopolitical scenes, according to Elvira Arnoux, “alter to some degree that which is automatically accepted as well as communicative routines, and force those who are involved to engage in an interpretive action that accounts for the anomalous effect that was generated”. From this perspective, we analyze first how the indignados´ ritual is discursively established through the active rejection of the lettered forms that establish the political limits of liberal democracy —originating in legal discourse— according to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. We will then analyze the potencial of this gesture to shape, through its aesthetic and discursive form, a new collective political subject. The silent scream will then be analyzed in contrast with Spain´s New Year´s Eve grape-eating ritual, celebrated annually in the same urban space wrapped in similar aesthetic forms. Through De Certeau´s theory on the common´s daily political practices and, later, Turner´s theorization of “liminal states”, we will explain how the Silent Scream, on the basis of its ritual condition, expresses a new political subject and democratic ideal through a series of antidisciplinary practices where the aesthetic formulations of the multitude reinterpret, loosen and circumvent the limitations of official grammar.