Radical politics of social change emerges from and is intricately intertwined with the struggles of the body.
Social change as structural transformation necessitates the placing of the body on the line.
To transform structures calls for the creation of conditions that make the status quo untenable. When it no longer is sustainable for the structure to continue in its existing form, the processes of social change start unfolding.
The organizing for social change, therefore, is one of creating the conditions that enable social change. To create these conditions, communities and activists at the margins routinely place their bodies on the line.
The "body on the line" narrates the oppressions written into the structure, witnessing the everyday forms of violence carried out by the structure. It accounts for, questions, and explores the fissures in hegemonic formations through the act of speaking.
So what does "body on the line" look like?
In culture-centered organizing at the "margins of the margins," the body on the line means the placing of the body as a counterhegemonic structure for voicing. The body emerges as a resource that renders visible the oppressions perpetrated by the structures. It becomes a register for voicing narratives critically interrogating the structures, placed in the face of the structures.
The body becomes a visible site of resistance to the structures by facing the structures. Its subject of critique and transformation is the hegemonic structure of the colonial-capitalist state-market.
The body on the line emerges as a discursive register for articulations from the margins, for making claims that challenge the structure. The body on the line documents the erasures and renders visible the communicative inversions deployed by the structure. In doing so, it negotiates the risks that emerge from the direct attacks launched by the structures targeting the body.
Body on the line is a political commitment that is intertwined with action.
Body-on-the-line politics calls into question the neoliberal organizing of representational politics that turns to palatable forms of representation to accommodate the market logic of the structure.
Body on the line critically interrogates armchair posturing that profits from the performed criticality of inaction that secures market-friendly radicality through structure-speak. This performance of radicality for the sake of it becomes a game in the competitive infrastructure of free-market radicalism. The "Look, I am oh-so-radical" becomes a race toward performed progressivism that suits the diktats of the free market. The concept of critical reflexivity is co-opted into opportunist and self-promoting market-friendly radical posturing to not have to do the actual work of building and sustaining solidarity in the struggles to dismantle structures.
Reflexivity is incorporated as an excuse for not doing anything while claiming radicality. In this form of self-aggrandizing performative reflexivity, the questioning is directed at the organizing at the margins. To the extent I am ever critical, every suspicious of collective organizing, I can create the performed rationale for my inaction.
I didn't join the protest march because it was not gender-sensitive enough. I situate myself outside of the "body on the line" organizing challenging Hindutva because it only focuses on addressing Islamophobia. I undermined the Left political party because it was not adequately organized to address the various intersections. In fact, that was the very reason why I continue to undermine the Left party in my public performances while taking funding from Ford Foundation.
To the extent that one can posture the right kind of radicalism that is at the same time oppositional to collective organizing at the margins and any form of organized Left politics, one becomes palatable to the neoliberal structures of accommodative multiculturalism.
Culture emerges as a site for performing another layer of difference, in an iterative quest for performed reflexivity, while at the same time, paradoxically lending fuel to the free market forces.
"Body on the line" politics questions the form of disembodied critique that is performed not from a place of solidarity with movement organizing at the grassroots, but from a place of seeking to appear more radical/progressive. It invites us to critical reflexivity that emerges from the actual work of placing the "body on the line."